Animal breeding as effective methane mitigation strategy
Ruminants, emit methane, which is one of the strongest greenhouse gases responsible for climate change. Strategies to reduce the amount of methane from ruminants are currently heavily searched. Animal breeding is one of the most promising climate change mitigation strategies. To identify animals with a genetic predisposition for lower methane emission, breeding values for methane emission as selection tools for farmers and breeding organisations need to be estimated. To achieve accurate and most reliable breeding values large number of individual animals need to be measured for the trait of interest. Methane emission is a novel trait in animal breeding, routine recording schemes are just currently being developed and implemented in some countries. In order to increase the accuracy of breeding values for methane, an international effort is undertaken by collating methane recordings of individual cattle in Australia, Poland, Spain and The Netherlands. Altogether, this will build an initial data pool of around 12,000 cattle recorded for methane emission. This is one of the largest methane data pools available as to date. Methane emission can be measured with different techniques. In Australia, the GreenFeed system is used to record methane emission on pasture. In Spain and The Netherlands, a so called sniffer system is used, where a gas sensor is installed in the automated milking system and methane is measured during milking of the cow. The work in Re-Livestock will combine all methane measurement measured with different devices with state of the art methods to estimate breeding values (genomic selection) to provide farmers with the most reliable breeding values for methane emission as selection tools on farm.
Re-Livestock - Facilitating Innovations for Resilient Livestock Farming Systems
Ongoing | 2022-2026
- Main funding source
- Horizon Europe (EU Research and Innovation Programme)
- Geographical location
- Spain