Climate is the average pattern of weather. Climate change is the significant impact and change to these average weather patterns which could last for many years.
Although the Earth has experienced natural climatic changes over its existence, over the last decades, humans have significantly contributed to changing the climate which affects in the way we live.
The single human activity that is most likely to have a large impact on the climate is the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas, which creates carbon dioxide (CO2) gas. With the increase of CO2, global temperatures rise creating changes in the weather patterns.
However, as bad as this is, another gas has a 23 times higher negative effect than CO2 on the climate, methane.
One of the biggest contributor to methane emissions is animal agriculture, and more specifically, the animal producing the most methane – around 70-120 kg – is the cow.
The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) says that agriculture is responsible for 18% of the total release of greenhouse gases world-wide – more than the whole transportation sector. The release of about 100 kg per year for each cow is equivalent to about 2,300 kg of CO2 per year.
But how much is this really? To put it in perspective, the same amount of CO2 is generated by burning 1,000 litres of petrol. With a car using 8 litres of petrol per 100 kilometres, you could drive 12,500 km per year.
Thus, as FAO Chief Livestock Information and Policy Branch Henning Steinfeld said: "Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today's most serious environmental problems. Urgent action is required to remedy the situation."
Everyone agrees that something has to be done in the sector in order to reduce the impact that livestock have on climate change. There is a new trend in research cropping up to study just this, how to reduce the amount of methane produced by ruminant animals, such as cows. This is why genetic scientists have been gathering in Aberdeen, Scotland.
Specifically, the EU has funded a £6.5 million (around €7.7m) project entitled 'Ruminomics' involving 11 European organisations over four years that includes Aberdeen University and Quality Meat Scotland.
The object of the project is to "exploit state-of-the-art technologies to understand how ruminant gastrointestinal microbial ecosystems, or microbiomes, are controlled by the host animal and by the diet consumed, and how this impacts on greenhouse gas emissions, efficiency and product quality".
Specifically, the methanogenic archaea (the bugs that produce methane) will be examined and to see how the population of the archaea changes according to nutrition and the host animal.
The ways cows emit a massive amount of methane is through belching, with a lesser amount through flatulence. The reason the project is called ruminomics is because of the way the cow works, as a ruminant animal. Ruminants have four stomachs and digest their food in their stomachs instead of in their intestines, as humans do. Ruminants eat food, regurgitate it as cud and eat it again. The stomachs are filled with bacteria that aid in digestion, but also produce methane.
Thus, this project will look into the genetics and breeding of cows as well as their feeding habits. As the scientists say, cow-reindeer metagenomic studies will establish how host species influence ruminal microbiology and function.
To put it in simpler terms, the belief is that methane emissions in cattle could be influenced by individual genes, and to identify the genetic pattern behind this phenomenon is hoped to lead to low methane farming.
Professor John Wallace of the Institute of Nutrition and Health at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland is leading the EU project, and believes that isolating the gene responsible for methane emissions in cattle could open the door for farmers to breed more environmentally friendly animals.
As Wallace told New Europe: “Different individual animals produce different amounts of polluting emissions. Is this determined by the composition of microorganisms in the rumen and, if so, is it heritable and therefore a trait that can be used for breeding animals with low emissions?”
The four-year project will study the genetics of 1,000 dairy cows to answer this and other questions. Some of the methods used to study the bovines is to take “digesta samples to extract DNA for laboratory analysis, partly by next-generation sequencing”, as Wallace made clear.
As for the result of this four-year project, Wallace added: “New tools for rapid analysis of microbiomes will be developed. A public data warehouse will be created to make the information, such as metagenomic sequences, available as a resource to all interested scientists. Representatives of the livestock industry are full partners in the project, in order to ensure maximum usefulness of the results in practical situations.”
Root of the problem
Grazing areas were filled with a variety of grasses and flowers that grew naturally, offering a diverse diet for cows and other ruminants. However, in order to improve the efficiency of feeding livestock, many of these pastures became reseeded with perennial ryegrass.
With the aid of artificial fertilisers, perennial ryegrass grows quickly and in huge quantities, but the drawback is that this species contains far fewer minerals and vitamins than the naturally replenished pastures.
This is the main reason for the excess methane eruptions from our dairy cattle; he difficult-to-digest grass ferments in the cows' stomachs, where it interacts with microbes and produces gas.
Also, this type of feeding also contributes to a decrease in infertility in the cows and makes them weaker, which ends up killing them when they are younger.
Bigger picture
The European Commission is adopting a new strategy for a sustainable European bio-economy and plans to invest €45 billion by 2025. The sectors included are agriculture, forestry, fishing, food and paper production and energy industries. It seems as if the Commission believes that studying the eating habits of cows, and perhaps a little gene manipulation through breeding, may be the answer to our short term employment problems, but could be a little off when it comes larger picture of global warming.
The issue goes beyond the greenhouse emissions of ruminant animals. They are inefficient converters of food to energy, consuming, on some estimates, up to 54 kilograms of feed to produce just one kilogram of beef. And when they graze in arid zones, cattle degrade the quality of soil and increase the size of deserts. Even recently, the Commission issued reports on soil degradation in the EU and the loss of fertile land.
It doesn't take much research to reveal that most of this soil degradation comes from unsustainable use of the land and deforestation. All of these are interlinked as forests are cleared to create land for these ruminants; deforestation also unlocks carbon dioxide from trees as they decompose, and releases it into the atmosphere. As the senior scientist at the World Preservation Foundation, Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop said: “Livestock now outnumber wildlife by eight to one, eat six times the amount the dinosaurs did, and five times what humans consume.”
In some parts of the world, more than 90% of the forests were cut down to make way for animal agriculture. In Europe, around 60% of arable land is used for grazing livestock. Thus, our insatiable appetite for bovine has created a larger problem which negatively affects our climate.
As for breeding animals to make them low methane emitters, there are also some issues that arise. It raises serious issues as to the effects it could have on the ecosystem itself. As one of the Italian researchers in the EU project said: “We don’t want to breed an animal that releases less methane but presents another environmental issue or has reduced milk yield. We want to improve the environment, but also welfare and productivity as a package.”
The question lies as to whether the Commission should rather spend this money into combating the real problems, such as our eating habits and deforestation. The most effective, cheapest, proven and no ‘genetic altering by breeding needed way’ of reducing the impact of ruminants on the environment is actually something much easier, but less scientific.
It concerns our consumption habits - we would need to eat less meat and dairy products, which will then clear fewer forests and use less land for grazing. However, it is a tough sell for the Commission to push a more 'healthy' way of eating, as the animal agriculture industry is a money-making machine (animal value output 2010 €138bn), which is reluctant to change.
Therefore, this 'Ruminomics' project seems to be a stop-gap rather than a real viable solution. However, at a price tag of €7.7m price tag, it seems that the Commission has dirtied its fine pair of shoes by stepping in the cow-pie.
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