Research win for cattle, environment

In his speech at Meat & Livestock Australia's More Beef from Pastures More Meat, Less Gas, Higher Profits field day at Avenue Range, Prof Hynd said cattle waste the equivalent of one kilogram of grain a day in belching during the metabolism process, which soon adds up to a significant amount of money.

Pricing feed grain at $250 a tonne, this loss amounted to 25 cents a cow a day. For those with a 3000-head feedlot, it equated to $750 a day.

He said it was a win-win situation to find ways to reduce methane emissions - 21 times more greenhouse gas potent than carbon dioxide - and improve growth rates at the same time.

He said there had been attempts to reduce methane output through vaccination against methanogens, chemical inhibitors and antibiotics, without long-term success.

"It is like drench resistance: if you try and hit bugs with one approach you nearly always fail because they will find a tricky way around it but if you target them from a number of approaches most of which are depriving them of hydrogen fuel then you are basically starving the methanogens to death," Prof Hynd said.

The University of Adelaide research, funded by the Australian Government's Department of Agriculture in which Prof Hynd is chief investigator, has focused on a multi-targeted approach on the biochemistry in rumen and managing the microbial populations.

Prof Hynd acknowledged beef producers faced a much more difficult task than winemakers who managed simple microbial populations with one yeast and two or three bacteria, but believed it was possible.

The rumen of a cow contained about 200 species of bacteria, 20 species of protozoa plus several species of fungi.

"Each single millilitre of rumen fluid contains about 10 billion bacteria, so in the entire rumen you are talking 200,000 more rumen bacteria than there are people on the planet," he said.

The research is focused on lessening the amount of hydrogen available to produce methane in the rumen; inhibition of methane-producing microbes through the use of ionophores, inhibiting the ciliated protozoan which live with the methanogens, and increasing the rumen fluid outflow rate which washes out the methanogens.

To achieve this they are developing a pellet using commonly available feedstuffs and byproducts in SA, such as grape marc, lucerne offal and canola meal, all of which have specific methane inhibiting properties.

"We are trying to be as practical as we possibly can be and will look to producers for advice. We want to form a cost-effective supplement with comparable energy levels to anything already on the market which is easy to transport and distribute," Prof Hynd said.

* Full report in Stock Journal, July 3, 2014 issue.