Barry Mitchell: The cow jumped over the moon [belch] or was it
propelled by its own methane?
Matthew Hayek, PhD: Because of the way they digest food,
cows belch out millions of tons of methane, a greenhouse
gas that's even more potent than carbon dioxide.
Barry Mitchell: That heifer harmony accounts for about 25%
of all the world's methane, an odorless gas that traps
heat from the sun with the unwanted result of raising
our planet's temperature.
In other words, global warming.
Cows have a four-part stomach and they need all four to
break down the grass, hay, and other tough to digest
roughage in their diet.
Fermentation helps do the job in the rumen,
their largest stomach.
But fermentation also creates a useless byproduct, methane.
And it comes out of which end?
Matthew Hayek, PhD: Out of the front end.
So the vast majority is actually from
belches, not flatulence.
Barry Mitchell: Agricultural scientists at the University
of California Davis had great success reducing dairy cow
methane using feed additives.
No, not that.
Seaweed.
Ermias Kebreab, PhD: Red seaweed called
Asparagopsis Taxiformis reduces methane emissions
by 60 to 80%, depending on what the animal style is.
Barry Mitchell: How do you get the cows to
eat the red seaweed?
Maybe they don't like it.
Maybe they don't want to eat it.
Ermias Kebreab, PhD: Yeah, actually, you know, in high
doses they don't like it, so what we do is we mix
it with molasses to try to mask the taste of the
salty seaweed kind of thing.
Right now that I know of, at least four companies that are
producing and working on this.
And one of them came out and said that they will
have enough seaweed to feed all cattle in the
United States by 2030.
Barry Mitchell: And, now, point - cow-nterpoint.
Matthew Hayek, PhD: The headlines are massively
over-exaggerating the amount of methane reduction that
you get from these new feed additives, because you only
get them from one small part of the cows' lives.
In an individual cow in a feedlot, these seaweed
additives can suppress cattle emissions by 60 to 90%,
which is a very good thing.
But most of the emissions from cattle don't occur
on these feedlots.
In the feedlots, cattle are being fattened up very quickly
and don't actually admit nearly as much methane than
they do out on the pasture.
Ermias Kebreab, PhD: A lot of cattle are range, you know?
In India, 330 million cows and they're mostly,
you know, on the range.
So how do you get to them? The beef cattle on range.
That's the tricky part right now.
Matthew Hayek, PhD: And the second drawback is that
if we pay farmers a lot of money to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions by adding these feed additives like
seaweed and nitrogen based additives, then those
farmers in turn might want to produce many more cattle.
And if they have a lot more cattle, they're
not only belching more methane, but they're
defecating into waterways.
So we could actually end up increasing the environmental
harm while we're trying to pay farmers to reduce it.
Barry Mitchell: While we wait to see if seaweed is a game
changer for the world's 1 billion cows, here's another.
Put down the double cheeseburger.
-Juicy broiled hamburgers with just the right touch
of charcoal flavor from the fire have become an
American institution.
Matthew Hayek, PhD: Whatever the solution is around me,
there are big co-benefits for eating healthier
diets across the board.
If we were to eat more things like fruits, vegetables,
beans, legumes, whole grains, that might crowd out a certain
amount of the amount of meat that Americans are used
to eating just by default.
-When it comes to green and yellow vegetables,
Ralph thinks of Wendy, the prettiest girl in the class.
Matthew Hayek, PhD: There are other things that we know
can reduce methane emissions.
We can encourage less beef consumption.
You can put beef in a different part of the store,
or you can put a beef alternative right next to meat
in the meat aisle, and folks will pick it up and put it
in their basket more than if it's off in the organic food
section where no one browses.
-Beef really does ring the bell.