Tasty Seaweed Reduces Cows’ Methane Emissions by 99%

The numbers I often cite are for the US market: 94.8 million head of cattle * 25 pounds dry weight * .01 = 23,700,000 pounds of AT per day or 11,850 tons.

You're right that we can break this down with more granularity between US beef cattle (31.8 million head requiring 3,975 tons AT at 25 dry weight pounds daily consumption), dairy (9.35 million head requiring 4,675 tons AT @ 50 dry weight pounds daily consumption), calves, etc. For these two markets, the total daily tonnage required is 8,650. There are cattle that don't fall into dairy or beef categories. For US cattle industry numbers and statistics, see: https://www.ncba.org/beefindustrystatistics.aspx

We should be careful we don't talk ourselves out of efforts that are good for the world simply because they're not a one-stop solution. If Good Algae can grow to address markets outside of the US, amazing, but we will start here. And I will champion those taking additional measures to combat the crisis facing our planet.

The US produces 912,358 tonnes of corn per day (or 900 million kg). I suspect corn is much easier to grow than seaweed though. Just as a perspective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_...

Thanks for this, I tried to do the calcs but couldn't find all the numbers.

Thb I'm not particularly fazed by the large numbers, we already manage to ship 100 times this for the global herd already. The big question is the economics, if the economic benefits (milk/beef) yield are bigger than the costs it'll take off regardless. If the economics aren't there it may take a bit longer but there aren't many governments worried about sticking their oar into farming matters.

Sounds like we need to start researching the effects of eating US trash on cow methane emissions. There might be a synergy here.

it certainly seems like a farfetched bandaid for a very inefficient food source (no matter how you view it)

Reducing methane emissions is not a health benefit.

Probably none, we aren't ruminants.

Basically none. We will continue to dose cattle with antibiotics as long as there is additional gain from doing so, regardless of how profitable cattle without antibiotics are.

Antibiotics in farming is used in order to keep animals in a environment where if it wasn't for the antibiotics they would get sick.

Factory farms, or concentrated animal feeding operation as it are sometimes called, are crowded and stressful for the animal. Hygiene, temperature and ventilation are often bad. In combination this create a environment where sickness is rampant and currently antibiotics is the primary tool to keeps it functioning enough to be profitable. Seaweed is extremely unlikely to replace antibiotics in those kind of operations.

There is no evidence of a fresh water shortage. We had the wettest year in 125 years in the U.S. this year. Where is this coming from? Water usage is a local issue, not a global one. Certain local communities have to watch water usage depending on rainfall. Certain ones do not. Either way, cows drink water and pee water. Water goes through the same cycle it has for billions of years. The U.S. used to have a wild bison population as great as the present cattle population. Same digestive system. Beef is one of the healthiest foods on the planet, and we evolved to eat meat, and have been eating it for 2.5 million years. I'm all about sustainable agriculture. I'm not all about faddish diets and eco-fascism.

Water is only an energy problem. The world has more water than we'd never know what to do with, the issue is taking the salt out of it. But that is "merely" an energy issue due to cost, as soon as we have cheap solar, the problem is solved, and in the meantime, we pay more, but we won't all die of thirst on big blue.

Since when should our diet be based on environmental concerns and not nutritional value? Feeding people an incomplete diet sounds like a lousy way to prevent climate catastrophe.

The mechanism is mostly understood, but not perfectly. Most people know that a cow has multiple stomachs. The second stomach is called a rumen. A cow chews it's cud (essentially big mashes of grass and grain, which a stomach cannot digest). This cud is passed through the first stomach and into the rumen, which contains beneficial, digestive bacteria. The bacteria in the rumen essentially ferment the cud and make compounds which can be digested in the subsequent stomaches. Unfortunately, methane is a natural byproduct of this process.

AT and a number of other algae contain very low amounts of a compound called bromoform. Bromoform in high amounts is toxic, but it's believed that bromoform in these trace amounts changes the chemical reaction being undertaken within the rumen such that methane is no longer a product. The result is a more efficient digestive process, essentially lending energy back to the cow. Easier digestion for cows seems to equal better health and immunity, increased length of heat, increased food conversion ratios and perhaps just happier cows. There is a possibility of interaction with additional trace nutrients and compounds in the algae as well, and this is being researched.

Something to note is that AT is not the only algae that reduces methane production in cattle. It is just, by far, the most efficient. And algae is not the only product which decreases methane in cattle, as well. Companies are marketing probiotics and small molecule methane inhibitors which do similar jobs, but again, AT is nearly twice as effective.

> we are seeing early indications in research of some amazing additional benefits – improved milk production, increased immunity, improved food conversion ratio (meaning you can feed cattle less and have them pack on more protein)

These "additional benefits" are all things that would increase profit - reduced loss of output from sickness; increased production; reduced feed consumption.

If the seaweed is cheap enough, it could be worth it for farmers to use without additional incentives. Though, they would also get green cred "for free."

Edit: fix typos

+ in email works the same way since sendmail

If you put out are fire, where does the smoke go instead?

The methane was produced by a bacteria, it is never produced to go anywhere if you get rid of the bacteria. The trade off might be poorer digestive efficiency if the cow relies on this bacteria to break down some common molecule. Although it could just as easily be the case that the bacteria was introducing inefficiencies.

From the article: "When added to cow feed at less than 2% of the dry matter, this particular seaweed completely knocks out methane production. It contains chemicals that reduce the microbes in the cows’ stomachs that cause them to burp when they eat grass."

It is simply not produced. Methane is CH4. The carbon goes into CO2 instead (which is bad, but not as bad for the environment as methane).

An additional thing to consider is that not all greenhouse gases are created equal. You can find any number of articles to cite as source that methane is 20 to 30 times worse for the atmosphere in causing warming than carbon dioxide.

https://blogs.princeton.edu/research/2014/03/26/a-more-poten...

Even if the seaweed were shipped in trucks over distance you'd likely still have a large net benefit as only a small amount of seaweed needs to be added to the cattle's diet in order to prevent methane emissions.

Doesn't this seaweed grow in the sea? As far as I understand, the main water concerns as relate to cows, are about freshwater for growing fodder.

We aim to grow close to consumption.

Perhaps one step further is to bypass even the plants and produce protein directly from CO2!

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/nasas-idea-for-making...

You can not grow enough fruits, vegetables and nuts to feed the human population without severe deforestation. Also, agriculture uses up pretty much most of the obtainable drinkable water.

Hopefully beyond meat and similar companies are able to continue to drive forward their research. I had a Beyond Burger for the first time recently and it was unsettling. The flavor was beef-like but the texture was wrong.

I will happily eat either a beef burger or a veggie burger but the Beyond Burger is in the uncanny valley right now.

No, it’s not. Most of the places where nuts are grown in industrial scale are water challenged.

Animal agriculture is unsustainable at the scale we operate in today in the United States. Meat doesn’t equal feedlot, and pastured ruminant agriculture helps sustain the land.

That's an interesting way to put it into words. In paper sounds like a really unefficient pipeline (vegetables -> animals -> humans).

Thanks for that, made me reflect on how stupid it sounds but how common it is.

Cows are much better at extracting nutrients from, say, grass than humans are.

In places where nuts, vegetables, fruits aren't available, meat may be a more environmentally friendly choice.

It's easier to consume those things... until winter arrives. Unless you support the massively carbon intensive process of shipping ~80% of each hemisphere's food supply to the other during winter, this isn't viable. Even if that is acceptable, it isn't sustainable.

But doesn't the animal save you time. The animal essentially consumes these things for you so you don't have to.

Humans cannot get or synthesize all of the amino acids from a plant diet.. we need animals or chemistry.

Why not have the herd on a surface barge and have an automated system pull seaweed up a conveyor belt to feed them? This would free up the land acreage for human use!

It's not that scaling is an objection, it's that scaling is a barrier.

Supply chains today tend to depend on things we already know how to and are actively mass producing. To add a new paradigm-shifting stage in the chain, it needs to grow to sufficient scale, which requires funding and R&D, and the path there isn't always clear. In other words, it's not so much that we can't get there, so much as we don't know how.

They’ll just become sea cows, obviously.

Hopefully we'll be beyond meat at that point /s. But yeah most panaceas are too good to be true, and are usually thought of by people forgetting to take into account all of the necessary terms in their equation.

REALLY? Someone flagged this?

Fucking hell HN, you need to chill.

How many cows were there pre industrial revolution compared to today? I would guess at at least 2 orders of magnitude increase, is that all 'natural'?

> most often "skeptical science remarks" although popular, are poorly informed and misleading.

I thought I was the only one who noticed this! Seems very popular and common in forums like HN and Reddit, but less so elsewhere.

Its not about skeptical remarks being poorly informed. It's about taking a thought that could occur to anyone thinking about the issue at hand without having all the information, presenting it, and having an informed reply. It's part of the dialog, and shouldn't be demonized!

My impression is that farmers generally areconservative about how they change their feed for their livestock. I don’t think there is any risk that they will “kill half the cow population” in a hurry.

Good book, that.

Having a small sample and a large effect doesn't mean you're guaranteed at least some effect on a large sample. If anything, a very large effect is more likely to indicate a flaw in your method.

In a small sample, the observed effect needs to be large in order to cross the threshold for statistical significance. It could still be a fluke and the true effect zero or even negative.

Most agricultural colleges/universities have their own farms/herds as well.

> cow farts

burps, fwiw

Don't cows already eat quite a bit of chlorophyll?

> At some point we will end up diverting a sizable percentage of global productivity to either scrubbing CO2 or dealing with the effects of our failure

Not necessarily. Current research indicates that stratospheric aerosol injections could lower global temperatures enough to offset greenhouse gas at a price tag of $3 billion per year. That's only 0.002% of world GDP.

The technology's well-understood and the effects are already well-tested as it basically mimics the global cooling seen after major volcanic eruptions.

I'm not saying it's a sure shot. But it's a very very promising technology that could potentially sidestep the need to reduce carbon emissions whatsoever. At the very least we should at least be funding more research and doing small-scale deployments to test it in production.

[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aae98d

...or you could leave the cows alone and impose some regulatory controls on oil/gas production and yield that reduction in a few months.

Big money is hoping to disrupt agriculture by shifting to fake meat substitutes. Shifting to some sort of soy/pea/coconut mix isn’t much better for the earth or human health.

Exactly, every part of this problem is divided up so much that individually nothing is significant. Its all just snowflakes in the avalanche.

The per country stats are not very useful either because as far as the environment is concerned countries do not exist. You could draw a line half way through india and call both halves a new country and now both parts have reduced their emissions by 50% but thats not a very useful observation.

Or transportation + electricity which is nearly 60% in the U.S.

When that comment shows up, there are two very different motivations. One (mine) is to underscore the math to better visualize the size of the problem. Note that I still said it's worth doing.

Another is to use it as some sort of premise to implicitly argue we shouldn't do anything, which is completely different, and which I explicitly disavowed.

Well, that's what I meant by CO2-equivalents. They figure methane into the math that way. Removing that methane would account for 5% of the CO2-equivalent problem we have. As potent as Methane is, it's dwarfed by the amount of CO2 we've added.

Do you remember a source? I'd be happy to update my own thinking to that number if I found an argument for it.

Surely there is a commerical incentive. Environment- or image-minded companies that want to buy carbon offsets can do so by paying cattle producers to use this tech.

regulation can't change reality.

It's about as realistic as having congress declare the world flat.

That sounds like a realistic constraint...but how can that be true? Seaweed seems pretty abundant.

His point still stands. You cannot just hope to disturb a complex system and expect a linear outcome.

Or it might be a realistic point of view.

My point was not give up on _solutions_. I am saying that there are real issues to be solved - for example, we do need some way to heat homes, we do need to transport ourselves - so find sustainable solutions to those. Provably (medically), we do not _need_ to be eating 60 kg of beef per person per year.

The more we tinker with the system, the higher the risk we break something else. It's an inherent property of complex _systems_ that they are complex, and well, systems. Is it worth tinkering to try to solve a popular, but not essential issue like how can we continue to grow cows for human feed?

Point taken. But obviously these companies are looking to serve the market at large, not niche populations; millions of people consuming beef regularly (average American 83 kg/yr, average German 57 kg/yr etc), not to speak of the meat that is thrown away every day.

Such solution perpetuate a mindset where instead of admitting we have crossed a line where the planet cannot sustain our beef habit, we're looking for a way to justify not weaning ourselves off it.

Can anyone honestly believe that growing algae for cows won't affect the world's already disturbed ocean eco-systems?

>> It's clear that humanity will not stop consuming

What makes it clear? An abundance of incentives to consume it (availability, price, taste), and no disincentives to not?

What cows eat? Ah you mean soy. Nah we can’t use that. Would be a shame if the cow used 10x the amount of calories to grow before we eat it when we could eat the crops instead and make your comment look uninformed

Perhaps. The keyword is moderate. However, based on historic levels there are plenty of people well past moderate.

Yes, I hear you. But please note, I was intentional about the words I used. That is, "Generally unhealthy."

The way I've heard it said best is this:

"Cows' milk is a nutritional and hormonal cocktail intended specifically for the growth and development needs of baby calves. Needless to say, if anyone is reading this, they are of the cow species, and should be mindful of their dietary consumption.

This study [1] does indeed not reference N2O. So this make me suspicious:

The garlic study [2], states: "Garlic contains allicin, diallylsulide, dialyldisulfide and allyl mercaptan, which affect rumen methanogens, decreasing rumen CH4 and acetate production and increasing rumen propionate and butyrate production (Busquet et al., 2005)."

Allicin is not referenced in the sea-weed study. One would have to study the exact mechanism [3], to be conclusive.

[1]: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[2]: http://www.thecattlesite.com/articles/2858/effect-of-garlic-...

[3]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4714447/

> Why can't those comforts we "sacrifice" be cruises, gasoline/diesel cars and all advertising?

This is only my opinion, but cutting out meat is incredibly easy. If you're in an area with no public transport then it's hard to stop driving your car especially if your livelihood depends on it.

It's just a lot of time and money trying to fix the meat industry when the solution is 'stop'.

> For most people that's simply not an option. But, if all people were eating just a little less meat, that would be an incredible improvement already.

Completely agree!

> Do you think it's been proven enough to be sure that plant based diet is better in terms of GHGE than meat based diet?

For me, yes.

> Would you say it's easy to hit all required protein's targets while eating only plant foods?

I find it relatively easy, although most days I also have a protein shake I take to top me up. It's not required but as a runner I prefer to have a little more protein than technically required.

> Even a small amount of the seaweed in a cow’s diet was shown to reduce the animal’s gases by 99%.

So if the cow eats seaweed it will also reduce any other gases produced by said cow ? does this apply worldwide or to cows in a specific area ? How about other animals that produce methane, is this applicable to them too ?

> When added to cow feed at less than 2% of the dry matter, this particular seaweed completely knocks out methane production. It contains chemicals that educe the microbes in the cows’ stomachs that cause them to burp when they eat grass

Is reducing these microbes healthy for the cow ? Won't it lead to shortening life span of a cow and therefore leading to requiring more cows ?

> if Australia could grow enough of the seaweed for every cow in the nation, the country could cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 10%.

Does this mean methane gas from cows represent 10.1% of greenhouse gas emissions of the country ? (i.e. reduced by 99% from 10.1% to 0.1% ?) How does the seaweed get to the cows ? Wouldn't this mean more dependency on trucks to bring the seaweed to the cows ?

And the million dollar question - how many % of the world's methane gas production does Australia represent ?

Point taken. "Bastardization" isn't black and white. It's measured in shades of grey.

Seriously? It's hard for me to picture cows wandering on a sandy beach. But, if true, I stand corrected - to a certain degree. Thanks.

I was referring to the water consumption needed to grow meat

He gets this from nowhere and just proceeds to nonchalantly throw in stupid remarks in a debate that he doesn't like. It's an attempt to derail the discussion about proper solutions.

You just quoted an article with no credibility and zero comparison to natural methane emissions. Mind reading before plugging links? That was the first thing that came up for me in Google too, and the reason why I said what I did.

Edit: just looked up EPA website and found this: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases#m...

- couple things to note: "50-65% of all methane emissions are caused by human activity" - I wonder how they define that though? Is feedback from human activities that flows into natural-seeming emissions such as permafrost melt considered natural? If it is, that's excluded from the 50-65% figure!

- Other thing: "Natural gas and petroleum systems are the largest source of CH4 emissions in the United States." - 31%

- Landfills - 16%, coal mining - 8%

That right there is 55% of human-caused methane and has nothing to do with cows.

I'm not saying the solution should not include all of the sources, but to what degree should we be worrying about cows vs. all that other crap? Shouldn't the focus be on natural gas and petroleum emissions?

Edit 2: I don't appreciate your personal attack on my attitude. If questioning sources and solutions that make the biggest impact is considered an attitude, then forget all civil discussion. Why bother commenting?