needed before recommendations can be made, she says. In North America, it is common to feed yeast-based products to high-producing herds in order to improve fibre digestion in the rumen. Improved fibre digestion improves nutrient absorption efficiency. “They don’t directly reduce methane, but they improve feed efficiency,” says Beauchemin. “You get more energy out of the feed, so you get more milk per kilogramme of feed and you get less methane per kilogramme of milk.” But the first strategy has to be improving feed quality to im- prove production efficiency, says Beauchemin. Most im- provements can be made in terms of forage by feeding less fibrous and more digestible forage. Methane is the result of poor quality feed fermenting, she says, noting that adding legumes to the diet seems to be beneficial.
DSM – digestive feed additive There are seven enzymatic steps in a cow’s rumen that con- vert hydrogen and carbon dioxide into methane. DSM Nutri- tional Products has developed a digestive feed additive, Bo- vaer, that blocks that conversion temporarily to inhibit the production of methane using the active ingredient 3-NOP. The effect of 3-NOP is fully reversible in the animal. Once feeding is stopped, methane production goes back to normal. Furthermore, 3-NOP does not kill the micro-organisms that produce methane. It simply minimises their activity. It is also very specific, so it only hits methanogens in the rumen microbial population and nowhere else.
“This is really good from a regulatory perspective – from all kinds of perspectives – because this is also why we don’t see and don’t expect negative consequences,” says Maik Kindermann, director of innovation and technology at DSM. Feeding just 1–1.5 grammes of Bovaer to each cow daily re- duces methane production by 30% or 1 tonne per cow per year, said DSM’s Clean Cow programme director Mark van Nieuwland. Three cows’ worth of reduction is equivalent to removing one car from the road. But the actual reduction of methane is always the result of interplay between the dose of 3-NOP, the diet and the animal being tested, he says. 3-NOP has been widely studied around the world. Trials were conducted in 13 countries in Europe, North America, South America and Oceania, and results have been published in 31 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals. In a scientific paper published in PNAS in 2016, for example, Evert C. Duin and col- leagues concluded that the mode of action is indeed effective. DSM Nutritional Products filed for market authorisation in Europe in 2019. They expect approval sometime next year.
Holistic approach advised Each new strategy implemented impacts the overall carbon balance, so promoting one strategy over another could lead to an imbalance in the system. For this reason it is advised that farmers evaluate their entire production system carefully. In some countries, modeling tools help farmers make balanced decisions. But this is, perhaps, why feed additives are an attrac- tive option, as producers do not have to change their diet at all.
▶DAIRY GLOBAL | Volume 7, No. 3, 2020 33
For dairy cattle, results showed that methane in- tensity (i.e. methane pro- duction per kg milk) decreases.
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