“New Zealand has been a leader in pastoral farm production, now we need to be leaders at reducing while producing,” Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor said.
Eleven research projects, funded and delivered under the alliance of 64 countries, have been recently completed under the Global Research on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases (GRA).
NZ contributed one-third of the global investment of $28.7 million in the projects.
Project milestones include new technologies for developing methane vaccines, which have now been included in NZ’s domestic vaccine programme for cattle.
There is also a better understanding of how ‘direct-fed’ microbial and silage inoculant products can be produced to enable cows to deliver beneficial microbes to pastures, which includes contributing to Fonterra’s new methane-reducing probiotic for cows called Kowbucha.
Other projects relate to potential nitrification inhibitors to reduce nitrous oxide emissions and nitrate leaching from grazed pastures.
O’Connor says the GRA provides a multinational platform to identify global climate issues and work together to make breakthroughs and develop practical solutions.
“The GRA enables us to identify, understand and tackle issues more rapidly than if each country acted alone. It also provides a network for sharing, so the research outcomes can have wider benefits across the globe,” he said.
On another front, the opportunity to breed more climate-friendly cows is one step closer for NZ dairy farmers after a Waikato trial found a possible link between a bull’s genetics and the amount of methane they produce.
The pilot trial, by artificial breeding companies Livestock Improvement Corporation and CRV, with funding from the NZ Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre, measured feed intake and methane emissions – in the form of burps – from 20 young bulls destined to father the next generation of NZ dairy cows.
“Methane production primarily relates to how much an animal eats. We’ve accounted for this and we’re still seeing variation which suggests genetics plays a role in a dairy bull’s methane emissions – now we need more data to prove it,” LIC chief scientist Richard Spelman said.
The research will now progress to a much larger study where operations have scaled up to collect measurements from 300 young bulls, the full intake from LIC and CRV’s Sire Proving Scheme.
“If this genetic link is confirmed, farmers will ultimately be able to breed low methane-emitting cows from low methane-emitting bulls,” he said.
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