Cleaning up cow burps to combat global warming
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In the urgent quest for a more sustainable global food system, livestock are a mixed blessing. On the one hand, by converting fibrous plants that people canβt eat into protein-rich meat and milk, grazing animals like cows and sheep are an important source of human food. And for many of the worldβs poorest, raising a cow or twoβor a few sheep or goatsβcan be a key source of wealth.
But those benefits come with an immense environmental cost. A study in 2013 showed that globally, livestock account for about 14.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, more than all the worldβs cars and trucks combined. And about 40 percent of livestockβs global warming potential comes in the form of methane, a potent greenhouse gas formed as they digest their fibrous diet.
That dilemma is driving an intense research effort to reduce methane emissions from grazers. Existing approaches, including improved animal husbandry practices and recently developed feed additives, can help, but not at the scale needed to make a significant global impact. So scientists are investigating other potential solutions, such as breeding low-methane livestock and tinkering with the microbes that produce the methane in grazing animalsβ stomachs. While much more research is needed before those approaches come to fruition, they could be relatively easy to implement widely and could eventually have a considerable impact.