Special Livestock Feed Fights Global Warming By Lowering Cow Farts

Cows are one of the most flatulent creatures on Earth.

To be precise, each one produces the equivalent of three tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.

But, according to experts, their greenhouse gas emissions could be unnecessarily high – because of the diet they’re fed by competitive cattle farmers.

Co-founder and managing director of Switzerland’s Agolin, Kurt Schaller, told Reuters its formula can reduce that by 10 percent.

And, in turn, this could save the environment by tackling global warming.

‘We sell our mixture for around 1 million cows per year… There are 25-28 million cows in the European Union, so it is a big percentage,’ he said.

‘That represents 300,000 tonnes of CO2 reduction today.’

The United Nations says livestock farming alone is responsible for up to 18 percent of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

Nearly a quarter of that comes from bovine flatulence.

‘The burps for the cows – it is more burps than farts – contribute about … 4 percent of (all) greenhouse gas emissions,’ said Anne Mottet, livestock development officer at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

This is because cow digestion relies on millions of microbes in their guts that process and ferment high-fiber foods.

It allows the cows to eat tough foods like grass but produces a lot of methane.

Speaking to MailOnline about the new formula, Agolin Ruminant – which is administered at one gram per day with a cow’s usual feed – the company’s commercial director, Michael Roe, explained that it acts on bacteria in the animal’s rumen: a specialized stomach which ferments food prior to digestion.

This allows dietary components such as starch and complex carbohydrates to be used for production, rather than methanogenesis – AKA the production of methane.

In turn, this causes less flatulence and eructation – or burping.

Read rest at Daily Mail