Animal Bytes

Take Home Message: Reducing dietary CP had no effect on efficiency of ME use, but lowered methane emissions    
Reducing dietary CP concentration significantly decreased feed intake and milk production, but had no effects on energy partitioning between milk and body tissue or efficiency of ME used for lactation. That was the finding of a study, carried [...]

Take Home Message: The inclusion of 2% fish oil in the diet of steers will reduce methane output by approximately 25%, but will also reduce intake by 10%. 
Feeding fish oil to beef steers can reduce the amount of methane they produce – good news for the environment. But not so good, however, is an [...]

Take Home Message: To reduce methane output per kg milk feed higher levels of concentrates, but there is little affect of changing cow breed.
Increasing dietary concentrate level reduced methane emission as a proportion of feed intake and milk yield. But cow breed (Holstein compared to Jersey-Holstein) had no significant effect on methane output as a [...]

The challenge facing industrialised countries is to negotiate a long-term global regulatory framework, with intermediate targets, that can reduce greenhouse emissions to a level that limits the increase in global mean surface temperature to 2oC above pre-industrial levels.

Attempts to calculate the large-scale consequences of global warming for agriculture and food production, although difficult, do confirmed that most of the increase in production will come from the agriculture of developed countries, which mostly ‘benefit’ from climate change.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture is a laudable and necessary objective. It should be done, however, in the knowledge that not only will there be ‘disbenefits’ as well as benefits, but also that these ‘disbenefits’ will be compounded by issues relating to competition for resources.

Green house gas (GHG) emissions are highly variable between and within production systems and the optimisation, or management, of animal production systems has not yet been considered so there is room for possible improvement.

There is potential to reduce emissions from livestock systems by selection on correlated traits.

Decreasing the production of methane from ruminant livestock is desirable both as a strategy to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and as a means of improving feed conversion efficiency.

Scientists and farmers need to ask themselves two questions when considering the possible impact of climate change on current UK livestock production systems – do systems need to be more ‘sustainable’ and should we be doing more to prepare for the future?