Feed with seaweed could help gassy cows, planet

The smelly reality is that cows will always pass gas. But if farmers had more access to seaweed, cow flatulence might just stink a little less for the planet.

That’s the thesis of a New England-based aquaculture company which is launching a drive to become the worldwide leader in an emerging effort to thwart climate change by feeding seaweed to cows.

The concept of reducing livestock emissions by using seaweed as feed is the subject of ongoing scientific research, and early results are promising. University of California researchers have found that cows that eat seaweed appear to emit less methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming, when they belch and pass gas.

But one of the big challenges to implementing the seaweed solution is getting enough of the stuff to farmers, and the kind of seaweed that has shown results in cows isn’t commercially farmed.

Enter Australis Aquaculture of Greenfield, Massachusetts, which is in the midst of research at facilities in Vietnam and Portugal that is part of its push to become the first farm to produce the seaweed at commercial scale. The company calls the effort “Greener Grazing” and it expects to be operating at commercial scale in two years, said Josh Goldman, the company’s chief executive officer.

“If you could feed all the cows this seaweed, it would be the equivalent of taking all these cars off the road,” Goldman said.

The type of algae in question is a red seaweed called Asparagopsis, and it grows wild in many parts of the world. Researchers from the University of California, Davis, found earlier this year that methane emissions were reduced by 24 to 58 percent in a dozen cows that ate one variety of the seaweed, depending on dose.