Evidence has been presented that adding supplements to cattle feed will only have a short-term effect. “Within six weeks they’d gone back to how they were at the beginning”.

CO2Land org picked up the story that says a cow’s stomach will adjust to changes in diet, and soon return to producing the same amount of methane as before. This raises many questions on other research findings that encourage diet changes to reduce methane emissions from livestock and raises the question: Is it a sustainable solution to switch feedstock for livestock?

Visiting Australia, the livestock sustainability consultant Dr Judy Capper delivered her findings to a national dairy conference at Camden in NSW. She says Australia’s tests on waste from wine grapes and oilseed in cattle feed showed they work only for a few weeks. “Long term, the rumen has a tendency to return to normal no matter what you do to it”.

Also reported was that US studies show a dairy cow in milk production emits, with high quality dairy feed, 1.35 kg of carbon per kilo of milk. In Africa carbon emission is ten times as high per kilo of milk, because the quality of forage feed is so much lower.

Food for thought!

See her research on http://www.wsu.academia.edu/JudeCapperabcwire.send-wallace.rural