Who’s leading the herd on methane management?

🫧 A bump for cow burps

Enteric methane — the polite term for burps from cows and other cud chewing animals — is a primary contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, representing a significant climate liability. While the global livestock industry largely gets a free ride for this pollution (“burp taxes” and other methane-reduction strategies have been proposed and later rolled back in New Zealand and there’s been a debate about climate credits for cow poop in California), there’s still a problem waiting to be solved. For years, the sector has relied on inconsistently administered feed additives. However, a new era of gastrointestinal intelligence is arriving, thanks to a microscopic discovery that may allow farmers to target the problem at its biological source rather than just changing the menu. SN‘s Tina Hesman Saey reports from the field.

🏭 Factory in the field

The discovery is a newfound organelle (a specialized, tiny structure inside a cell that keeps the cell alive and functioning, acting like a miniature organ) within some fuzzy microbes that live in a cow’s first stomach — the rumen.