FORT COLLINS — When it comes to cattle life, the 40 or so bovines that loaf around in pens at Colorado State University’s agriculture research center have it pretty good, says Sara Place, associate professor of feedlot systems and a researcher studying them with the school’s AgNext program.
“A feedlot pen is a place where they can just pretty passively do whatever they want,” she added during an interview at the location a few miles north of the main campus on Aug. 8. “I mean, they get to eat whatever they want at will, drink whatever they want at will and hang out with their buddies. It’s not a bad life, right?”
The subjects here aren’t identified by name but rather by a number. A jet black steer with a No. 2 tag in its ear sauntered over to a row of buckets. It stuck its head in one, licked a bit of the corn mixture within and flicked its tail as it chewed its cud. Then it turned around and ambled off to do more of whatever. It was a typical day in the pristine facility maintained by CSU agriculture students. But the steers aren’t here to finish their fattening-up cycle before becoming the main attraction in someone’s beef bourguignon.
Unbeknownst to them, they’re participating in an experiment that will help researchers gauge how much methane they burp into the atmosphere while digesting their dinner. It’s being funded through a $1 million grant from North American beef giant Cargill, which produces nearly 11 billion pounds of boxed beef and by-products from 7 million cows per year and employs more than 2,000 people in Colorado.
The United Nations says methane has accounted for roughly 30% of global warming since pre-industrial times, and CSU says beef and dairy cattle burps contribute to about 3% of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. There are three main gasses associated with animal agriculture: carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane. And of these, methane is the most potent greenhouse gas.
So Cargill is paying CSU to see if researchers can figure out how to curb the methane in cattle burps while also investigating the USDA’s assumptions about different feeding strategies that affect methane production, which the beef giant says are not based on empirical data.
Why are cattle so gassy?
Back at the feedlot, Place waited patiently for No. 2 to finish eating. Then she waited again for him to mosey into a chute framed by metal fences that led to a machine that can capture methane emissions. Inside another bucket, No. 2 would find a treat of alfalfa pellets. Ideally, he would chew a few, swallow and belch.
Fun fact: Cattle release 97% of all methane gas through burps rather than farts.
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Place says the steers are so gassy because of the way their digestive systems are designed and something called the enteric fermentation process. What happens during it, in the simplest terms, is a steer eats whatever feed it’s given — grass, hay, corn silage — and then the microbiome, or combined genetic material of the microorganisms inside its digestive system, ferments the feed.
Fermentation creates byproducts — fatty acids, carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas — inside the steer’s gut, which microbes convert into methane. Then it belches and out goes the gas scientists say has a Global Warming Potential 28 times higher than carbon dioxide.
One of Cargill’s questions has been just how big is the environmental footprint of producing beef, said Eliza Clark, the company’s head of protein sustainability. In 2019, the USDA’s Agricultural Resource Service released the results of a study that systematically measured how much fuel, feed, forage, electricity, water, fertilizer and other inputs it takes to raise beef cattle throughout the country — from birth to slaughter.
The study showed the greenhouse gas emissions from cattle production varied little from what other credible studies had shown and were not a significant contributor to long-term global warming.
But Cargill wanted to identify spaces where they lacked the empirical data on livestock-related greenhouse gas emissions and use it “to upscale our entire industry with information that helps us make decisions about reducing methane, which is within our our broader commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with beef,” Clark said. “So the problem we’re trying to solve is trying to feed the world by also limiting environmental impacts and supporting producers.”
Enter CSU, the million-dollar grant and burping cattle.
The benefits of catching steer burps
Sadly for No. 2’s observers, he failed to let a single burp sneak between his lips after snacking on the pellets.
But Place said she still got some useful data, because the machine he munched from also measures the methane content in a simple exhalation.
The amount in No. 2’s out-breaths was four or five parts per million. If he had burped, that number would have risen to approximately 400 parts per million. And the amount of methane in his burp would have been dictated by the specific diet he was eating.
For weeks leading up to Aug. 8, he’d been chowing down on a special mixture of corn and “fibrious material,” Place said. But the corn he’d been eating had been structurally modified to make the starch inside more digestible. The process is called steam flaking, and it softens and increases the surface area of the grain, which makes more starch – and therefor more sugar and calories – available to an animal while decreasing the amount of methane it produces.
“It’s a complex biochemical process,” Place said, while No. 2 went back to the feed bins. “But if you take a corn kernel and you just crush it and crack it, you may have 91% to 92% of the starch in that kernel available to the animal. If you steam flake it, you can usually make 98% or more of the starch available and potentially lower the amount of methane produced by 15%.”
Incorporating things like a touch more fat or an additive that makes the animal more efficient at converting food into energy, leaving less left over to be converted to methane, are other things CSU is doing to see how much they can lower methane production through diet.
Then they’re comparing the methane released by animals on their diet to those on other diets, like “100% grass, or very-high forage” and they’re finding that in the steers eating the CSU-developed recipe “methane emissions will drop, usually around 40% for an individual,” Place said.
But “boring methodological requirements” dictate that researchers must have 55 spot samples, or times the steers visit the GreenFeed machine, to get a good representation of what the steers are emitting based on their diet, she added. And beyond that, genetics come into play, “so even in animals that eat roughly the same diet and are similar, there can be a 30%-plus difference in methane emissions between animals,” she said.
Cargill says the research could help the company achieve its goals of lowering its global greenhouse gas emissions by 10% by 2025 and greenhouse gas emissions per ton of product sold by 30% by 2030.
Beef’s battle over perception of its environmental impacts
All of this could help alter the perception advocacy groups have about environmental impacts of livestock production and mitigate the very real ways the beef industry contributes to global warming.
For years, large ranching operations in Colorado and beyond have been targeted by activists accusing them of contributing to environmental degradation and saying phasing out animal agriculture over the next 15 years would massively reduce carbon dioxide emissions through the year 2100.
And headed to the November election is a ballot measure to ban slaughterhouses in Denver city limits with a focus on 70-year-old Superior Farms, which slaughters about 300,000 sheep a year, and contributes its fair share of greenhouse gases, because sheep are also ruminants that produce methane during digestion from the fermentation of feed.
But Clark said North American beef production is about 35% more efficient than the global average in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and that the company is taking several measures to shrink its environmental footprint through its BeefUp sustainability mission.
It seeks to lower greenhouse gas emissions through better grazing management: to scale up regenerative farming practices that promote healthy soils and carbon sequestration; to accelerate innovation to tackle global warming; and to reduce food waste through things like shelf-life extension and partnering with food banks.
And one other way CSU’s research could help reduce methane emissions from the cattle industry is to make feeding cattle a diet that does the work attractive and attainable to ranchers.
Big beef’s efforts to slow global warming
Place says if it turns out that adopting methane-reducing feeding strategies lowers emissions in a big way, then there may be the development of incentive-based programs for ranchers to participate.
“It could be, like, maybe I can’t afford to steam flake my corn, but if there’s truly evidence that I’m going to lower my methane emissions by 20%, then maybe there’s an incentive to build my own steam flaker,” she said. “Or maybe I can purchase one and know that I’m going to have this beneficial environmental impact. So yeah, there are all sorts of possibilities that may happen, but that’s where step number one is. We need to know (our methane emission baseline) and how we can potentially lower our emissions.”
But either of those scenarios could be a long time coming, because it can take years for research to translate into practical application and for a society to make meaningful changes. Yet, if climate change continues at the pace it’s on now, systemic change may have to happen sooner rather than later.
Whatever the timeline, all the steers in the AgNext study have to do is loaf around, eat good food, offer up some gassy burps and passively keep helping solve the global warming crisis.