Photo by Thomas Curryer on Unsplash
Dairy farmers worried about greenhouse gas in cow farts could soon be approaching their favourite grass-muncher and asking, “Fancy a slice of kangaroo poo-flavoured cattle cake, Daisy?”
Cow farts are blowing holes in the ozone layer but scientists in America have found that adding an ingredient to kangaroo turds could provide a way of knocking back the ruminants’ atmosphere-damaging methane-loaded farting.
Methane is way ahead of carbon dioxide in terms of potency when it comes to global warming. The warming effect of methane in the atmosphere is 30 times that of carbon dioxide.
Ruminant stomachs are a collective methane manufactory, producing about half of global methane emissions. Kangaroo guts, however, produce acetic acid not methane.
Researchers found that by adding a methanogen-inhibiting chemical to baby kangaroo faeces and placing the faecal culture in a bioreactor designed to artificially provide the environment of a cow’s stomach, the bioreactor didn’t let off any methane at all.
What’s needed now is to try it out on real cows.
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