INTERVIEW ▶▶▶ Volta Greentech
Supplementing seaweed to reduce methane production
Making cows belch less methane, that’s the mission of the Swedish startup Volta Greentech. But how? By developing a seaweed-based feed supplement.
BY MARIEKE PLOEGMAKERS I
n May 2020, the company raised SEK 5 million (appr. US $ 500,000) to accelerate the scaling of the technology. Co-founders Leo Wezelius, CMO and Angelo Demeter, head of R&D explain how they address the two main challenges of getting the product onto the market; producing algae in large enough volumes at low cost, and developing a business model which creates incentives for farmers to use this solution on their farms.
All About Feed: How did it all start? Leo Wezelius: “It was a couple of years ago when we found out about research from Australia showing that adding a small amount of dried red seaweed to the diet of cows can reduce
Methane production steals energy from the cows in their digestive process.
methane production by up to 80%. The original motivation be- hind this research was to find ways to optimise animal efficiency, as methane production steals energy from the cows in their di- gestive process. At the same time, Bill Gates had just put up a blog post explaining the magnitude of the emissions caused by meth- anogenic bacteria in the digestion of cattle. Reading this and
6 ▶ ALL ABOUT FEED | Volume 28, No. 7, 2020
realising the immense impact that this seaweed could have to help farmers both make their production more efficient and more climate friendly, we started looking into what the challenges were to actually get it out to farmers. We concluded that there are two main focus areas: to produce the seaweed at scale in a cost-effec- tive way and to create economic incentives for farmers to actually use the feed supplement.”
How do you get farmers interested in using seawead? Angelo Demeter: “It’s well known that methane production in ru- minants is effectively stealing between 2 and 15 percent of the potential energy contained in cattle feed. Production of methane is an unwanted byproduct of the cows’ digestive system and re- search has shown that when you reduce methane fermentation, there is an increase in animal productivity in terms of either weight gain or milk yield. Although more research trials are need- ed to determine the exact efficiency increase in numbers, the two latest animal trials from Australia and California measuring the ef- fect on beef cattle show a clear increase in animal efficiency following the supplementation of the seaweed.
How does seaweed contribute to the reduction of methane? Angelo Demeter: “When cows use less energy to produce meth- ane, that same energy can be used to increase productivity. The species of red algae seaweed that we are focusing on, Asparagop- sis taxiformis, has been shown to naturally produce high amounts of the compound bromoform, which interacts with the enzymes that produce methane in a cow’s gut. Under normal circumstanc- es a great deal of the feed a cow eats would end up feeding un- wanted methanogenic bacteria in the rumen but, when this bac- teria is exposed to the seaweed’s naturally occuring bromoform
PHOTOS: VOLTA GREENTECH
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