What if genetic selections could be made to produce cattle that are better for your bottom line and the environment? Consider the possibility of an enteric methane emissions EPD and the impact it could have on future profitability, marketability and sustainability. Dr. Sara Place, associate professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University (CSU), and her team, are working to make this selection tool and other methane-lowering practices reality. Place said her research goals aren’t only about producing cattle that emit less methane.
“Enteric methane often comes with negative connotations relating to climate change with a focus on trying to emit less,” Place told WLJ. “While emitting less is one of the goals, one key element is usually left out of the conversation—methane emitted from cattle is feed energy being blown off into the atmosphere.”
Dairy beginnings
Place grew up on a dairy farm in upstate New York. Her roots in the agricultural industry run deep. Her passion and drive to impact the cattle industry and its environmental sustainability is evident not just in the excitement heard behind every word as she talks about her research, but also in her impressive resume.
Prior to her role at CSU, she served as the chief sustainability officer at Elanco Animal Health, the senior director for Sustainable Beef Production Research at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and as an assistant professor in sustainable beef cattle systems at Oklahoma State University. She earned her Ph.D. in animal biology from the University of California, Davis, and a bachelor’s degree in animal science from Cornell University.
Feed energy loss
Place said methane is a byproduct of microbial fermentation in the rumen that can represent anywhere from 2-12% of feed energy loss depending on the animal’s diet. The losses are typically higher for poorly digestible forage-based diets, and lower for grain-based finishing beef cattle diets. Feed energy loss is a decrease in feed efficiency. Therefore, cattle that produce more methane may be less feed efficient.
“Less methane emission has definite climate benefits, but it’s also improving our producers’ economic efficiency. If we reduce feed energy loss, we increase feed efficiency and growth.”
Dr. Sara Place
“A big part of our work is measuring growth performance and feed efficiency,” Place said. “We have to think about system level efficiency in addition to methane. We are interested in finding animals that are better at using forage and grain resources and therefore emit less methane. Less methane emission has definite climate benefits, but it’s also improving our producers’ economic efficiency. If we reduce feed energy loss, we increase feed efficiency and growth.”
Place said the first step to building any EPD is collecting enough data. Currently, the facilities at CSU allow for 300 individual animals’ methane emission, feed intake and growth performance to be measured at once.
“We’re currently using Angus cattle from the John E. Rouse-CSU Beef Improvement Center Ranch,” she said. “They’re all coming from the same herd, being managed and fed exactly the same thing. Within a single pen there can be a 30% difference in methane emissions across those animals, even though they have the same body size, same feed intake and the same performance.”
Place said they’ve worked with other breeds as well and found that even when comparing Bos indicus type cattle to British type cattle, the variation in methane production isn’t as broad as it is within sub-populations of animals.
“That makes some of our research hard, because there is so much variation in the cattle population, but that also means it’s probably something that we can influence,” Place said. “Based on other published research and some of our own, we assume methane emission is about 20% heritable. We can influence it and that is very exciting.
“Right now, we’re building a data set of animals with known pedigree. We collect DNA on these animals and we’re working towards creating a genetic test for methane emissions and eventually building an EPD,” Place said. “We’re interested in genetic selection for lower methane emissions because it’s a way to lower our carbon footprint that isn’t a daily input cost for producers.”
In the meantime, Place said lowering methane emissions doesn’t necessarily involve any unusual management practices. One key factor in methane emissions is keeping moderate cattle that are more feed efficient.
“It’s important to zoom out,” Place said. “We can do a lot in terms of feeding animals and genetic selection. For example, animals that are larger, eat more and eat faster emit more methane. Those are factors we can consider in management decisions.”
Economic and environmental sustainability
When it comes to greenhouse gas emissions in total, Place said, we need to look at bettering the efficiency of the whole system.
“Match cattle to their environment, do a good job with health protocols, and consider the reproductive efficiency of the animal. Get cows bred and don’t keep giving a baren cow chances. These ‘no-brainer’ things that are important for economic sustainability also lower greenhouse gas emissions,” she said. More economic sustainability often means more environmental sustainability.
Place’s team isn’t just tackling the genetic side of methane emissions, they’re trying to learn as much as possible about all aspects of enteric methane emission. For example, they conducted rotational grazing studies utilizing virtual fencing to see how time spent on higher quality forage impacts methane emission. They’re also diving into the microbial populations of the rumen.
“We take rumen samples from the animals we’re working with to look at what microbes are actually there and what they are doing,” Place said. “Despite 100-plus years of ruminant nutrition, there are still a lot of things we don’t know about the rumen microbiome. Today, we have the scientific capabilities to understand these functions on a deeper level, not just in relation to methane, but also in lifetime efficiency and health outcomes.”
Feed additives claiming to lower methane emissions are on the market, but Place said currently in the U.S., there isn’t an additive proven to lower methane production in beef cattle.
“You may have heard about different feed additives for methane reduction,” Place said. “Many of those, like seaweed, just aren’t practical, especially, for the grazing side of the sector. We hope to have the technology or feed solution to lower methane in the future, but today, most of those potential solutions are too early in their development to deploy in the beef sector. There is a lot of talk about it, but there still isn’t anything practical to place in the hands of our producers that will also make economic sense for them to implement and reduce enteric methane in a big way.”
To mitigate this issue, Place built a tool for producers looking to lower their enteric methane production through feed additives. The AgNext Feed Additive Calculator Tool (FACT) for Beef allows the producer to estimate a group of cattle’s current enteric methane emission, estimate the same group’s enteric methane emission if they are fed a methane mitigating feed additive (the user defines the mitigation value) and determine the economic implications of using the additive. FACT for Beef can be found at agnext.colostate.edu/beef-fact.
Working for the consumer
“Despite beef prices being really high, demand is still very strong,” Place said. “People like beef. That is a major positive for the future sustainability of the beef industry. Our product is something people desire. Our consumers want to know more about the product we offer. They want to see what producers are doing to improve the quality of their product, and in some cases, arguably a growing number of consumers, want to know what producers are doing in terms of improving their carbon footprint.
“That’s one of the fun things about my job: considering what’s next,” she said. “I am able to try things in our research environment that are still in the early days, they’re ideas. I get to try to refine them and figure out what could be practical in the future to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the industry, but also improve economic outcomes for producers.”
Hopefully, Place said, these are things that make management easier—better solutions to get people home to their families earlier in the day. “Those things matter for the sustainability of the beef industry, too.”
