Cow Methane A Lot of Hot Air

 An article in the Idaho Statesman…stated that the U.S. dairy industry wants to engineer the "cow of the future" to produce less methane, a project aimed at cutting the industry's greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020. The cow project aims to reduce intestinal methane, the single largest component of the dairy industry's carbon footprint.

 Certainly sounds noble..except for the fact that there isn’t all that much methane being produced. Mireille Chahine,  Asst. Professor of Dairy Management at U of I. “First of all is the dairy industry being unfairly pegged? I think it is because if you look at the numbers, if you look at the emissions in the U.S., you’d see that 6-7% of those emissions are methane and then if you look at the methane emissions, 20% of the methane emissions come from livestock. I’m just putting things into perspective. If we look at the 20% methane that’s being generated by livestock, 70% of that comes from beef cows and 205% comes from dairy cows. One reason, there are more beef cows than dairy and the other reason is that there’s a correlation between how much methane is produced by a cow and the type of diet and the quality of the forages. Usually dairy cows eat higher quality forages than beef cows.”