2023-08-16 13:19:24
Winnipeg – Canadian farmers have achieved something that could certainly resonate with some households: they burp and fart less. So not the farmers, but their cattle!
Farmers have bred climate-friendly cows that emit less methane than their peers up until now. The news agency reports Reuters.
Ben Loewith, a third-generation farmer in Lynden, Ontario, Canada, began artificially inseminating 107 cows and heifers in June with the first commercially available bull semen with a low-methane genetic trait. When the calves are born next spring, they will be among the first in the world to have been bred with one specific environmental goal: to burp less.
Loewith: “As long as we don’t sacrifice other traits, selective breeding for lower emissions seems like an easy win.”
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Adopting commercially available genetics to breed dairy cows that emit less methane could help reduce one of the biggest sources of the greenhouse gas. Scientists and experts in livestock farming are sure of that. According to Semex, the genetics company that sold Loewith the semen, introducing the low-methane trait could reduce its dairy cattle’s greenhouse gas emissions by 1.5 percent annually and by up to 20 to 30 percent by 2050.
Because: burping is the main cause of methane emissions from cattle!
In the spring of 2023, the company began marketing bovine semen in 80 countries, including the UK, USA and Slovakia.
Frank Mitloehner, a professor of animal sciences at the University of California Davis, who was not involved in the development of the trait: “If low-methane cattle breeding is widely adopted, it could have a profound impact on global emissions from cattle .”
Livestock is responsible for 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Methane is the second largest greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide.
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