RESEARCH & INNOVATION
COW BURPS & CLIMATE CHANGE
A special ingredient could break the connection .
BY BRITTANY HOOK
THINK OF POLLUTION and what comes to mind — smokestacks ? Gridlocked traffic on the highway ? Probably not ol ’ Bessie in her pasture . Yet livestock is a major producer of methane , a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide . In California alone , more than half of all methane emissions come from the state ’ s 1.8 million dairy cows as they burp , exhale , fart and produce manure .
Yes , cattle are a gassy bunch , but they don ’ t have to be . These troubles of the turf may be relieved by a product of the surf .
Jennifer Smith , a marine ecologist and seaweed expert at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego , was intrigued by a recent UC Davis study in which small amounts of dried seaweed
PROMISING PLANTS Marine ecologist Jennifer Smith at Scripps Institution of Oceanography views Asparagopsis taxiformis seaweed , which could help mitigate methane emissions . were added to cattle feed . Preliminary results showed a remarkably promising 50 % reduction in methane emissions , but it is still unknown whether growing enough seaweed to meet industry demand is possible .
Smith set herself to find out . Since early 2019 , she ’ s been growing the red algae seaweed Asparagopsis taxiformis in her lab , exploring the potential for cultivation on a larger scale . Her shelves look otherworldly , with flasks of seaweed sporophytes looking like tiny pink pom-poms swirling with excitement .
“ The opportunity to potentially manage methane emissions from cow burps had never really been on the table ,” said Smith . “ But this unusual collaboration — a marine biologist working with the livestock industry and livestock scientists — might have an influence on greenhouse gas emissions .” She adds , “ It ’ s a crazy marriage of three totally disparate fields of science and I ’ m really excited to be part of that .”
Smith is working to find the “ sweet spot ” where the seaweed grows at its highest rate while also increasing its concentration of bromoform — the compound responsible for reducing methane-making enzymes in a cow ’ s gut .
“ It ’ s a crazy marriage of three totally disparate fields of science and I ’ m really excited to be part of that .”
– JENNIFER SMITH , MARINE ECOLOGIST AT SCRIPPS INSTITUTION OF OCEANOGRAPHY
There ’ s much work to be done to see if large-scale cultivation is possible , but Smith is driven by the possibility of contributing to research that could have swift impacts on the environment . Methane has a relatively short life span in the atmosphere — about 10 years — meaning changes made today could yield big results in the near future .
“ Asparagopsis is a complicated seaweed and little is known about its biology , so that poses a lot of opportunity from a scientific perspective ,” says Smith . “ It ’ s not something that we can just start scaling tomorrow . We have a lot of work to do to learn more about its biology , physiology and ecology before we can develop a model for scaling cultivation .”
Get an inside look at Smith ' s lab at : tritonmag . com / cowburps
18 TRITON | FALL 2019