AUSTRALIAN livestock could rid itself of its pollutant tag earned by being the nation’s third largest source of green house gas emissions if preliminary findings from a new methane heritability study are any indication.
Last month, scientist involved in a collaborative Western Australian and NSW greenhouse gas abatement project made the important breakthrough of successfully measuring the emissions from sheep via a simple breath test in a large sample of 700 sheep at the Faulkner research centre, NSW.
Previously methane levels could only be measured in special methane chambers, over a 24 hour period, one sheep at a time.
“There is evidence that methane production is heritable but to prove this we need to be able to measure large numbers of animals,” said project leader Dr Phil Vercoe, who has dedicated his career to improving animal’s productive capabilities and is the deputy director of animal production systems at the University of Western Australia.
“If we can identify that the level of methane production is heritable than there is an opportunity to make some serious progress in the reduction of it.”
He says sheep are ideally placed to play a major role in reducing the level of greenhouse gas emissions as science has already proven that that the variation in methane production between individual sheep is as high as 10-20per cent.
That being the case, Dr Vercoe said, there is an “ideal opportunity” for selection of low methane producers providing the trait is heritable.
Meanwhile, under the consensus that more efficient animals will produce less methane, Meat and Livestock Australia modeling has shown that decreasing feed requirements in terms of dry sheep equivalent per head by one per cent would result in a weighted NPV $15.9 million per year for lamb and sheep meat production.
Individual sheep emit about 20 litres and cattle up to 280 litres of methane a day.
Under Dr Vercoe’s direction, the livestock methane reduction project is also assessing the impact different feed has on methane production.
The project falls under the four-year $130 million Australian Farming Future funding program announced by Minster for agriculture, fisheries and Forestry, Tony Burke last year.
“If we can reduce methane production there is the potential to not just reduce green house gas emission but to also improve production as well,” Dr Vercoe said.
“We know that the more you eat the more methane is produced but what we don’t know is how much of a role genetics play.”
Beef Industry Centre of Excellence Dr Roger Hegarty explained: “Eight per cent of gross energy in food goes to methane so what we would like to do is repartition this into something useful like wool or milk.”
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