Ruminating on animal burps
A vaccine is the best hope for limiting livestock methane emissions but a commercial product remains years away.
Years of research into reducing New Zealand’s agricultural greenhouse gas emissions have so far failed to produce a solution, although farming leaders insist there is cause for optimism.
The main targets are methane and nitrous oxide, which together account for about half New Zealand’s emissions. Methane is produced in the rumen of cattle, sheep, deer and goats, where microbes – methanogens – break down the animals’ food. In the process, they produce methane, most of which is belched into the atmosphere.
Most nitrous oxide comes from animal urine. The nitrogen released by a cow urinating on a paddock is more than the soil and plants can take up, and some of the surplus is converted into nitrous oxide and some is leached through the soil as nitrate. The wetter and more compacted the soil, the more nitrous oxide is produced.
Rick Pridmore, chairman of the Pastoral Greenhouse Gas Research Consortium, says researchers have found forages such as brassicas that reduce the amount of methane produced in the rumen, but the gains are likely to be offset by an increase in nitrous oxide emitted from the soil. That’s because farmers use break-feeding – using a moveable electric fence to ration grazing – which leads to pugging and compaction of soils that in turn increases nitrous-oxide emissions.
Some animals have been found to be genetically primed to produce lower methane, says Pridmore. The problem is that it could take 20 years to breed that trait through the whole population, and produce only a 5% reduction in methane. “That doesn’t mean we walk away from that, but we are working on the premise that we need solutions that work by 2030.”
Key areas of research are chemical inhibitors that could be administered in bolus form into the animal to counteract methane production, or a vaccine to tackle methanogens.
A German company has developed an inhibitor that it claims can reduce methane by 30%, and is aiming to have a product on the market by 2019. But it is geared towards livestock raised in feedlot systems typical of the Northern Hemisphere, and is not regarded as practical to administer to New Zealand’s pasturegrazing animals.
Pridmore says the consortium is also working on an inhibitor, and has identified five compounds that could work. But he says a commercial product that farmers could use is at least eight years away.
The most promising area of New Zealand research is on vaccine development but, again, a commercial product is at least seven years away. He says the aim is to knock back methane production by at least 20%, which researchers believe can be done without affecting animal productivity.
A vaccine would be developed from antibodies in the animals’ saliva and would generate an immune response to thwart the activity of the methanogens.
If a commercial vaccine can be developed, the global market could be enormous. Research by scientists here and overseas has shown all ruminants have the same kind of methanogens, regardless of diet or species. “That means when you find the solution for dairy cows and sheep, it is probably going to work on every ruminant in the world,” says Pridmore. “That’s why we are so wedded to trying to do this very difficult task. Everything I know about the vaccine gives me great positive feelings that they are going to nail the impossible.”
If a commercial vaccine can be developed, the global market could be enormous.
of methane emissions from cows and sheep (see story, page 20).
Beef + Lamb New Zealand is setting up a project to investigate how plant-based, lab-grown and insect-based protein alternatives could affect the red-meat sector here. Chief executive Sam McIvor says one of the objectives will be to sort “hype from reality”, identify the threats and opportunities, and understand consumer attitudes to alternative meats.
He says New Zealand’s pastoral red-meat production is among the most emissionsefficient in the world. If production here fell, demand would simply be met by higheremitting farmers elsewhere.
However, such claims are hard to confirm, given the widely varying methodologies used internationally to measure the lifecycle effect of food production. According to a conference presentation earlier this year by AgResearch principal scientist Stewart Ledgard, emissions from beef produced in Oceania (primarily New Zealand and Australia) are similar to those in European and North American systems, where the animals are typically grain-fed and housed in barns for much of the year.
CHANGE COMING
Sector heads such as McIvor are wondering if the high-tech protein sector is mere hype, but Landcorp’s Carden says change is coming, and fast. A century and a half of pastoral farming has done an “enormous amount to build the economic backbone of this country”, but the industry model based on land conversion and increasing stock intensity has reached its “economic, social and environmental limits”, he says. At the same time, the explosive growth of animal-free proteins will be “substantially disruptive”.
“I think they will become mainstreamed into a core range of products, principally either a combination of the traditional patty – minced meat, which is a substantial proportion of beef consumption globally – and obviously in the milk market as well.
“So, New Zealand needs to think pretty rapidly about how it repositions itself. I don’t think people’s aversion to faux meat in a hamburger patty will last long, either because they don’t know about it because – judging by the Impossible Foods burger – it’s impossible to tell, or because over time they won’t care because they understand the environmental story, and the taste is great, and it’s at a price point that’s cheaper than they used to pay.
“When a McDonald’s or a Burger King is at the point where they are starting to introduce those products, that will mainstream it. The horse will have bolted at that point.”
But shifting to a “new farming future” won’t be easy, says Carden, who has overseen the cancellation of further dairy conversions, the development of sheep and deer milking and large-scale tree planting since taking the helm at Landcorp four years ago.
“In the first place, if we are going to produce animal protein, we have to make it really high quality and niche and difficult to replicate, because there is always going to be a segment of the market that’s prepared to pay. But they will have to pay much more and it will have to be worth it for them to pay much more. So it needs to have a good provenance story around it, as well as health and well-being attributes.”
The search for alternative land uses – such as protein crops – is no less challenging. “What do we do with all the assets that are on this land that are designed to milk cows? Because animals are relatively inefficient at turning plants into protein … to produce the same amount of food from plants from a calorie perspective would require much less land, especially if you were starting to use it for, say, Sunfed or Impossible Foods, which are highly efficient.”
He says there is a serious risk of “billions and billions of dollars in stranded assets”, including high-priced agricultural land that has had its value driven up by demand for dairy conversions, and dairy sheds and processing plants reliant on high milk volumes.
“Change is coming to the sector quickly,” he says. But most farmers are small businesses dealing with volatile conditions and with limited capital to make big changes. “It’s not like they can get a bank loan to fund the retrofit of their cowshed into a hydroponic nursery, when that market is not yet developed.”
Kiwi farmers won’t be immune to the effects of radical change. “There’s no reason food production shouldn’t be disrupted in the same way that taxis [by Uber], hotels [by Airbnb] and phone companies [by technology] have been. In fact, we are probably more vulnerable.”
As one of the first entrepreneurs in the world to commercialise a plant-based meat alternative, Sunfed Meats founder Shama Lee is at the leading edge of that disruption. But she believes the company, which she started three years ago, represents an opportunity for New Zealand farmers. She says she’d love to be able to source the yellow peas used to make Sunfed’s Chicken Free Chicken from Kiwi growers rather than importing them from Canada.
“We want to grow this industry so that farmers have a choice. It’s about expanding possibilities. We are stuck in this old way of thinking and we can’t seem to get our way out of it. We need to take a step back and re-engineer the whole system. This trend is happening, very strongly, and either we [New Zealand] do it or we get left behind.”
“New Zealand needs to think pretty rapidly about how it repositions itself. I don’t think people’s aversion to faux meat in a hamburger patty will last long.”