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["Lynda" <lurine AT com-pair.net>]

Smoke and mirrors!  Do NOT touch the guys who are really producing the 
methane (factory hog and beef farms, both the animals and the holding ponds) 
and tell folks that it is the sheep who are out there roaming over a great 
area and swallowing most of what they belch!

Guess these guys are getting some of that Teflon money.  Sounds like the 
kinda pork study that routinely comes out of DC.

Lynda
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "bobf" <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>



Alright Lynda, and the rest of you with burping sheep.  This sounds 
serious..  This am WSJ...............

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Silencing the Lambs: Scientists Target Sheep Belching to Cut Methane
Reducing Gas in Livestock Could Help World Breathe Sigh of Relief Over 
Global WarmingArticle

»By PATRICK BARTA

PALMERSTON NORTH, New Zealand -- On a typical day, researchers in this 
college town coax hungry sheep into metal carts. They wheel the fluffy 
beasts into sealed chambers and feed them grass, then wait for them to burp.

The exercise is part of a global effort to keep sheep, deer, cows and other 
livestock from belching methane when they eat and regurgitate grass. Methane 
is among the most potent greenhouse gases, and researchers now believe 
livestock industries are a major contributor to climate change, responsible 
for more greenhouse-gas emissions than cars are, according to the United 
Nations.

Gassy Sheep Add to Global Warming

2:06

Animal biologists in New Zealand are leading one of the most sophisticated 
efforts in livestock stomach research. Their goal? To reduce global warming 
by producing less gassy sheep. WSJ's Patrick Barta reports.
Plenty of people, including farmers, think the problem of sheep burps is so 
much hot air. But governments are coming under pressure to put a cork in it, 
and many farmers fear that new livestock regulations could follow. They 
worry that environmentalists will someday persuade the U.S. Environmental 
Protection Agency to seek to tax bovine belches. Some activists are urging 
consumers to stop buying meat and thus slow climate change.

All of which is breathing new life into the study of sheep stomachs. 
Researchers have tried just about everything, from changing the animals' 
diets to breeding new sheep they hope will be less gassy. They've concocted 
cocktails of clover, garlic and cottonseed oil to try to curb methane. They 
have even tried feeding the animals chloroform, which can stymie the 
production of gas if it doesn't kill the animal.

But sure as grass grows, livestock keep producing methane.

"We're at a very theoretical stage," says Simone Hoskin, a livestock expert 
from Massey University, an institution involved in the research going on in 
this grassy New Zealand town. "A lot of people think we are insane."

There was an earlier golden age of sheep stomach research -- in the 1950s, 
'60s and '70s. In those days, governments were looking for ways to improve 
animal digestion so livestock could produce more food for a hungry planet.

But as worries over food supplies waned, research tailed off. Scientists, as 
it happened, weren't all that thrilled about fishing around in animals' 
stomachs, which can contain up to 150 pounds of mushy meadow grass. "The 
stuff smells in a way you can't imagine," Ms. Hoskin says. "It really stays 
on you."

The root of the problem is that sheep, cows, goats and other so-called 
ruminants are unique in the way they digest their food. While that allows 
them to convert more energy from grasses, the process also generates 
hydrogen as a byproduct. Microbes known as methanogens convert the hydrogen 
to methane, which then leaves the animal through belching -- and to a lesser 
extent, flatulence -- and then floats into the atmosphere, where it helps to 
trap heat and potentially accelerate global warming. Humans emit methane, 
too, but not so much.

As awareness of the issue has grown, the U.S., U.K. and other countries have 
stepped up their research. But "there is no question that New Zealanders 
lead the world," says John Wallace, a scientist at the Rowett Institute of 
Nutrition and Health at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

That's partly because New Zealand prides itself on its environmental 
conscience. It is also, Kiwis say, from necessity: Their otherwise clean 
island is home to about 35 million sheep -- nearly 10 times the human 
population -- and millions of cows, deer and goats.




As a result, roughly 48% of New Zealand's greenhouse gases come from 
agriculture, compared with less than 10% in such large, developed economies 
as the U.S. Agricultural leaders fear their livestock-heavy economy could be 
at risk if there's an international move to tighten rules on animal 
emissions.

Kiwis tried to get a leg up on the problem in 2003, when politicians 
proposed an emissions tax on livestock. Farmers thought they were getting 
fleeced and attacked what they called a "fart tax." The idea was tabled.

But livestock owners and scientists knew the issue wasn't going away. With 
the help of industry groups such as Meat & Wool New Zealand, they put up 
millions of dollars to finance a war on sheep emissions.

The group, the Pastoral Greenhouse Gas Research Consortium, helped assemble 
eminent animal-stomach experts from around the world. They included Ms. 
Hoskin, who had spent much of her career working on such topics as the role 
of leafy turnips in deer grazing. It also included itinerant ruminant 
researchers from the U.K., Germany, Peru and Sri Lanka.

Much of the work occurs here in Palmerston North, a town north of Wellington 
surrounded by rolling hills and filled with some of the most sophisticated 
animal-emissions gizmos in the world. Chief among them: 10 "respiration 
chambers," which scientists use to measure burps under different 
experimental conditions.

Pumps circulate fresh air into the chambers. Researchers rustle up an 
animal -- often a sheep -- from behind a laboratory, and then wheel it into 
the chamber, where the bleating creature munches on grass. The concentration 
of methane in the air then usually increases. The cud chewer is oblivious.

"They love it here," says Cesar Pinares-Patino, a Peruvian scientist who 
helps run the chambers. The animals "can look at each other and be 
comfortable." Sometimes they stay in the chambers for days, he says.

The boxes help show what strategies are working. But scientists haven't 
achieved a breakthrough. Many of the dietary additives known to reduce 
methane -- cottonseed oil, for instance -- don't work well in the long run; 
sometimes they cost too much or the animals don't digest them well. 
Chloroform additives worked for a while, but the animals' stomachs adapted 
and started emitting again.

Researchers are particularly proud of one achievement, though: Using genome 
sequencing to draw a genetic map of one of the leading methanogens. Team 
members passed around a single-malt whisky when they finished that work in 
June. They say the breakthrough should make it easier to identify compounds 
that can attack the methanogens so methane isn't made in the first place.

"We now know our enemy," says Peter Janssen, a scientist who worked in 
Germany and Australia before returning to his native New Zealand two years 
ago to do livestock emissions research.

Some farmers elsewhere in the world are bemused. "I applaud them" for 
trying, says Eric Davis, a cattleman whose operation in Bruneau, Idaho, has 
more than a thousand head of cattle, and hence plenty of gas. But "I'm 
skeptical they'll come up with anything we can practically use," he says. 
Besides, "I still have a problem with whether methane is a problem."

Mr. Janssen admits his work would probably be "fringe science" if it weren't 
for all the interest in climate change. But he still thinks it will generate 
something useful.

"It could be two years, or it could be 20" before a solution to animal burps 
is found, he says. But someday, "it will suddenly show up. And then you will 
have it."

Write to Patrick Barta at patrick.barta AT wsj.com




http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123561039911777481.html



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