Rural Issue

Reducing methane emissions from beef cattle

One of the presenters at the recent Beef Methane Conference in Lincoln was Karen Beauchemin, a researcher with Canada’s department of agriculture, Agri-Food Canada. Beauchemin is headquartered at the Lethbridge Research and Development Center in Lethbridge, Alberta.

In an interview with Brownfield, Beauchemin discussed the work she’s been doing over the past 15 years in the area of methane mitigation.

“We know that methane is a very potent greenhouse gas and that it contributes to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which are implicated in global warming,” Beauchemin says. “But more importantly maybe, for producers, methane emissions are a loss of energy for the animal. Between three and maybe 12 percent of all the energy the animal consumes is converted in the rumen to methane gas, which is breathed out of the animal into the atmosphere. It’s an inefficiency in the system.

“So the question we asked was, would it be possible to reduce those emissions—improve the environmental perspective of beef producers—and possibly, would we be able to improve feed efficiency and make some more money for producers.”

AUDIO: Karen Beauchemin