BUSINESS OF BURPS
Scientists, firms smell a profit in cow emissions
LANCASTER, ENGLAND» Peaches, a brown-and-white Jersey cow weighing 1,200 pounds, was amiably following Edward Towers through a barn on a sunny March morning when the 6year-old dug in her front hooves.
Towers, a 28-year-old-farmer whose family owns Brades Farm, near Britain’s rugged Lake District, slapped Peaches gently to move her along. She didn’t budge. Already muddy from a morning herding hundreds of cows to a milking session, Towers leaned all his weight into Peaches’ ample backside, until she finally stepped through a metal gate
that would hold her head still for an exam.
Deepashree Kand, a scientist studying animal nutrition, stepped forward with a device about the size of a grocery-store scanner. As David Bowie’s “Changes” played on a radio, Kand pointed a green laser at the cow’s nostril and waited for Peaches to belch.
Kand’s employer, a Swiss company called Mootral, is studying whether an altered diet can make cattle burp and fart less methane — one of the most harmful greenhouse gases and a major contributor to climate change. If they were a country, cows would rank as the world’s sixth-largest emitter, ahead of Brazil, Japan and Germany, according to data compiled by Rhodium Group, a research firm.
It is a well-known problem that has had few promising solutions. But in the last five years, a collection of companies and scientists has been getting closer to what would be an ecological and financial breakthrough: an edible product that would change cows’ digestive chemistry and reduce their emission of methane.
Several companies are pursuing a seaweed-based compound, and a Dutch firm, DSM, is testing a chemical supplement with promising results. Mootral is one of the furthest along. By mixing compounds from garlic, citrus and other additives into a pellet that’s mixed with a cow’s regular diet, the startup has surprised scientists by significantly and consistently cutting the toxic output of animals such as Peaches.
At Brades Farm, Kand kept her laser steady. Changes in the light beam would measure the methane in Peaches’ burps, which she produced about once every 4 minutes. Soon, there was a subtle flex in the cow’s neck, and Kand’s device put out a few readings: 32 to 38 parts per million.
“That’s good,” Kand said. “A reduction of about 30%.”
The drop was consistent with the findings of several peer-reviewed studies of Mootral’s food supplement. Additional trials are underway in the United States and Europe. The product is being tested at dairy and meat farms, including a
Dutch farm used by Mcdonald’s for studying new techniques in its supply chain. Venture capitalist Chris Sacca, who became a billionaire with early bets on Uber and Twitter, has invested.
Many questions of viability remain. Mootral must prove that its product works on different breeds of cows and in different climates. It has had success in areas with mild weather, such as Northern Europe, but is now conducting experiments in hotter locations.
But if Mootral or one of its competitors can withstand the challenges of the coronavirus era and hold up at scale, the result could be one of the simplest and fastest ways to cut a major source of greenhouse-gas emissions.
“An existential threat”
Cows are a digestive miracle. Inside their stomach is an oxygen-free environment with a steady temperature, similar to the fermentation tanks used to make beer. Microbes decompose and ferment materials such as cellulose, starch and sugars. Cows can eat just about anything — grass, hay, cornstalks, rapeseed — and turn it into energy for producing milk and meat.
“They could live on wood,” said Mootral’s director of science, Oliver Riede.
But just as a midnight pizza can come with a gaseous cost, a cow’s digestive system has a way of retaliating. Methane is a main byproduct of the enzymes that help break down the food. The gas can’t be turned into energy, so as it builds up, a cow must burp, sending little puffs of pollution into the atmosphere. (A small amount is released by farting.) Up to 12% of a cow’s energy intake from food is lost this way.
There are about 1.4 billion cattle globally, each emitting the equivalent of 1.5 to 2.5 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year.
“This is an existential threat,” said Joe Towers, Edward Towers’ older brother, who also works at Brades Farm. “Farmers are keen to improve and show they aren’t the bad guys.”
“Want to smell it? It smells like fart”
Mootral’s main research lab is at the base of a lush valley, in a former coalmining region of Wales. The company’s work on cows dates to 2010, when a group of researchers participated in a European Union research effort to explore ways to reduce methane from cattle.
The team, working for a company called Neem Biotech, had studied garlic’s antimicrobial properties in humans. In lab trials, the scientists found that it also reduced methane in cows thanks to allicin, the same strong-smelling compound that’s produced when a garlic clove is cut with a knife. But the company was small and didn’t see a business case for the finding, so the work didn’t go any further.
Zaluvida’s founder, Thomas Hafner, bought Neem in 2012 intending to work on drugs for people, but during a review of past research, a colleague found the methane work in a computer file named “Mootral.” It explained how allicin interacted with microbes inside a cow’s stomach.
They’re still tweaking the formula. Every few weeks, Daniel Neef, a biochemist, travels to a nearby butcher in Wales to buy a stomach from a freshly slaughtered sheep. He cuts it open to extract a wet, tangled ball of grass and other feed. He squeezes the substance through cheesecloth to extract a liquid that he puts in glass milk jars
“Want to smell it?” Neef asked one day at the Mootral lab, opening the lid. “It smells like fart.”
At one point, Mootral’s scientists improved results by adding a trace amount of citrus from Spanish oranges. New additives are being tested.
The benefits of garlic breath
By 2017, Mootral was confident enough in its work to ask outside scientists to perform their own trials. That year, researchers in
Denmark and Germany published findings saying the company had reduced cows’ methane emissions more than 50% in lab simulations. In Mootral’s first tests in dairy cows on a fully functioning farm, Brades, methane emissions fell 38%. A California study found a reduction of about 20% in meat cattle.
Many scientists need more convincing. Hanne Hansen, who is an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen’s department of veterinary and animal sciences, said more published research was needed to prove the food additive would work on different breeds and in various climates.
“What happens in the laboratory is not always what happens in real life,” Hansen said. “Mootral has potential, but we need to see more proof.”