Holy cow! How feeding cattle seaweed can help stop climate change
Australian scientists have created a new cattle feed from seaweed that can help save the planet from the . Boffins at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation have developed FutureFeed, an additive made from a red seaweed called asparagopsis. Adding a small amount of the dried seaweed to cattle feed can reduce cows' methane production by 80 per cent. Methane is a greenhouse gas 28 times stronger than carbon dioxide that cattle release when passing wind. FutureFeed works when an active ingredient in the seaweed stops enzymes in the stomach producing methane, meaning cows' wind contains much less of the gas. Another big advantage, which makes the product attractive to farmers, is that the feed can make cattle grow faster because they lose less energy. Converting food into methane uses up 15 per cent of feed energy and this is greatly reduced when the cattle eats FutureFeed. The seaweed grows in water around Australian and other countries, with farms springing up in Tasmania, Sweden, Vietnam and California. The next step for CSIRO is to commercialise the feed and get it to farmers. According to the , the institution is only weeks away from launching a prospectus to attract investors. More than 20 per cent of the world's entire total of greenhouse gas emissions comes from livestock production. In Australia the contribution of methane emissions from livestock is around 10 per cent of total greenhouse emissions. The CSIRO website states: 'If just 10 per cent of global ruminant producers adopted FutureFeed as an additive to feed their livestock, it would have the same impact for our climate as removing 50 million cars from the world's roads, and potential increases in livestock productivity could create enough food to feed an additional 23 million people.'