Discoveries in cattle genetics and changes to feeding programs could help reduce greenhouse gases.
Cattle belch methane during digestion, but studies at the universities of Alberta and Guelph showed changes in diet and identifying which cattle digest more efficiently can reduce methane charged belches.
“The whole methane issue in cattle is becoming a big issue because there are a lot of cattle in Alberta and they produce a lot of methane. Methane is 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide,” said geneticist Steve Moore of the University of Alberta.
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It is possible to capture methane gas from manure and process it in an anerobic digester to produce energy.
“You can capture that methane but the methane the animals breathe out or burp, you can’t capture that. It just goes out into the atmosphere,” he said.
Carbon dioxide and methane emissions were measured by enclosing animals in a pen where they wore a special hood for up to 16 hours. Research showed the cattle that eat less but grow well also released less methane.
“The efficient animals released up to 25 percent less methane than the inefficient animals,” he said.
One animal might produce up to 16,000 litres of methane per year.
If that is extrapolated to five million head, the resulting methane emissions are significant. Moore said cattle account for 72 percent of total agriculture greenhouse gas emissions.
Next, researchers plan to work on the genetic component and find proven bulls across all breeds that are feed efficient and can potentially claim carbon credits for producers. Net feed efficiency trials have been run for some time and it is known to be an inheritable trait.
Private companies already can provide genetic tests on various qualities like meat tenderness or calving ease so a feed efficient marker is also coming.
“You can select bulls on the basis of their efficiency amongst other things and make progress that way,” he said.
“We don’t know precisely how well they work in the different animal populations.”
This research will expand into an international study to pool data with the United States and Australia.
“The difficulty in making these measurements on sufficient numbers of animals is such that no one country can manage enough to do enough,” Moore said.
Their only risk in selecting for feed efficiency is a small effect on fatness.
“The efficient animals are about two to five percent leaner than the inefficient animals. We can compensate for that by putting a little more emphasis on the fatness when we make our breeding selections,” he said.
Environment Canada estimates the agriculture sector released 60,000 megatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, with most coming from livestock, as well as increased synthetic nitrogen fertilizer use on the Prairies.
The last figures from Environment Canada in 2007 reported Canada’s national inventory of human induced greenhouse gases was 747 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents. Energy and transportation industries were the largest contributors.
Alberta is the largest emitter at 41 percent followed by Ontario at 27 percent, Saskatchewan at eight percent and British Columbia at five percent.
