New research may be good news for Canada’s reputation as a greenhouse gas emitter.
A master’s student at the University of Manitoba has discovered that beef cows emit less methane in the winter, compared to the warmer months of the year.
Jennilee Bernier and her supervisors at the U of M expected that scenario, but were surprised by the plunge in emissions.
“We found a huge decrease in methane in the winter, compared to the fall,” said Bernier, who measured the emissions in 30 cows in the fall of 2008 and the winter of 2009.
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“(Methane emissions) dropped from 327 litres (in the fall) to 256 litres in the winter … which is a 70 litres per cow per day decrease … which is really significant and a pretty exciting finding.”
Bernier, who is from Fisher Branch, Man., cautioned that the numbers are tentative at this point.
If the data checks out, the results would be good news for Canadian cattle producers, because greenhouse gas protocols usually assume that all cows are the same, Bernier said.
“When it comes down to carbon credits, or environmental sustainability, everybody is put on a level playing field,” she said.
If cattle in cold weather produce less methane, that means Canadian producers would have a sustainability advantage compared to cattle raised in warmer climates.
Karin Wittenberg, an animal science professor at the U of M, said the study hoped to establish baseline data for methane emissions.
“Same animals, same feed. Here’s what you’d expect in July and here’s what you’d expect in January,” she said. “There is very little information about how an animal behaves in the cold … with respect to some of these parameters that are important to the environment. Things like greenhouse gas emissions.”
Bernier compared the cows’ methane emissions during a thermal-neutral environment, September to November, versus cold-stressed conditions, January to March.
The methane results were part of Bernier’s thesis, where she supplemented a forage diet with dried distillers grains to see if the cows would process the feed more efficiently.
She said it’s likely that cows produce less methane in the winter because the animals alter biological functions to adapt to the cold.
“They increase what we call their rate of passage. Which means that when they consume nutrients, or whatever they consume, it would pass through their body at a faster speed.”
That means the microbes in the rumen have less time to change the feed into methane.
As far as Bernier knows, the work at the U of M is the first study on methane emissions from beef cows in Canada. She hopes to complete her master’s thesis by early summer, before she starts work as a forage and beef research specialist with Manitoba Agriculture.
