Methane

I spent most of yesterday at a symposium organised by the Australian Institute of Agricultural Science and Technology. A lot of topics were discussed, but one that interested me was methane , mainly that emitted from both ends of ruminants such as cows. There’s plenty to to say about this, but I’m just going to repeat one point that I made briefly and that subsequent speakers like Snow Barlow from Melbourne expanded on. Methane belched or farted by a cow is not just a greenhouse gas, it’s nutrition wasted by the digestive process. So, if we can find ways to reduce methane emissions, they should also increase the productivity of agriculture. That’s not to say that there are $50 bills lying in every cowpat, waiting to be picked up. If there were a cheap and easy way of improving digestion it would have been found by now. But there’s certainly a potential for increased output to offset the costs of finding, developing and implementing ways of reduc...