VALLE DEL CAUCA, Colombia — The chambers look more like walk-in refrigerators. Located inside a research building in southwest Columbia, they’re basically big metal boxes with big, big doors. Inside they have concrete floors, plexiglass windows and wall-mounted air conditioners.
These chambers serve a noble and highly scientific purpose: measuring burps and farts. In particular, those produced by animals.
In a few months, scientists from the Alliance of Biodiversity International and CIAT, an agricultural research organization that built eight of these chambers, will place live sheep inside each one. Then they would wait for the animals to pass the gas. Within 24 hours, that gas will run through high-tech machines that measure its content.
What exactly are they looking for? Among other things: methane.
The chambers are part of a multi-year project to reduce the amount of methane produced by farm animals. It is important. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, responsible for About 20 to 30 percent Global warming since the industrial revolution. D the bulk Global methane emissions originate from human activities, and Largest single source They include agriculture – namely, the manure of livestock such as cattle, goats and sheep, as well as their manure.
An animal consumes as much methane as it produces. And this is the basis of the new CIAT project. Starting in February, researchers led by Jacobo Arango will feed sheep — which have a similar digestive system to cattle — with different types of plants, such as legumes and grasses. Then they put the animals inside the chamber with more food to measure how much methane the animals produce. The idea is to identify specific types of forage that result in fewer greenhouse gases, with the ultimate goal of reducing global methane emissions and thus, combating climate change.
6,000 plants are being tested
The researchers aimed to test about 6,000 different cultivars, many of which are stored as seeds in a gene bank not far from the chamber at a CIAT research center near Palmyra, Colombia. Known as Bank The seed of the futureAbout 67,000 specimens comprise the world’s largest seed collection for tropical forage plants.
When I went to the bank one afternoon in October it was stifling outside, yet I had to put on a winter jacket to go inside. Seeds are kept in a room at -9.4º F and stored in vacuum-sealed packets made of laminated aluminum foil. Inside the room there were rows of seed packets sitting on mobile shelves like a college library.
For the methane project, scientists are using seeds from the bank and growing them into seedlings. From there, there are two main stages of testing. The first is testing plant material in a lab without animals. Researchers basically replicate a cow’s stomach, in a test tube, put some seedlings inside and see how much gas it produces. Only plant varieties that produce little methane — and meet other requirements related to things like nutrition and drought tolerance — will then be fed to the sheep. They will be placed in chambers, where their farts and stools will be measured.
Arango, a senior scientist at the Alliance of Biodiversity International and the CIA, said researchers could eventually put cattle in the chamber as a final experiment.
Lab testing is now underway, and several forage varieties already show promise, Arango said. Most of these are legumes, viz Leucaena diversifoliaA plant species with feathery leaves and flowers that look like spiky balls.
There are many reasons why certain plants may produce less methane. For example, some lemons are high in compounds called concentrated tannins. Tannin, which is also found in things like wine, giving reds their tamarind flavor, can suppress methane-producing bacteria in the cow’s gut.
Burp detector against climate change
Without addressing emissions from the food sector, it is impossible to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, beyond which climate change will be catastrophic. Reducing meat (and beef in particular) consumption is probably the most important part of that effort, but it’s an uphill battle because of meat consumption. is estimated to rise Worldwide in the next few years.
This makes identifying better forages a promising tool for at least controlling the climate impact of those carnivores, says Richard WaiteDirector of the Agricultural Initiative at the World Resources Institute, a research group. A Review published in 2022 It has been found that various changes in the diet of farm animals, such as feeding them tannin-rich food, can produce an average of 20 percent more methane per day, without reducing how much milk or meat they produce.
High-Tech Approaches to Methane Reduction from Farm Animal Methane Reduction Feed complement from VaccinationAlready under development. It is not yet clear, however, whether enough farmers, many of them from developing countries, will want to adopt these methods or be able to pay for them.
The advantage of the new CIAT scheme is that it is simple and useful for farmers in poorer regions of the world, where beef consumption is growing rapidly. The idea, Arango said, is to identify a forage that would help reduce methane emissions when farmers plant it on their cattle’s pastures. This is a way to add plant diversity to the pasture landscape, which comes with other benefits, such as more habitat for wildlife.
Ultimately, while measuring how much gas a sheep passes may sound like a joke, it’s serious science, says Waite of the World Resources Institute. “It’s funny because it burps and farts — mostly burps — but it’s really important,” Waite said. “It is a big part of emissions. So anything we can do to reduce these emissions while feeding more people is going to be really helpful.”
Kenny Torella contributed reporting.
