Inside the crazy race to stop cow farts and save the world

As Jeff Bezos backs a methane-blasting vaccine, we look at other ways to stop cow farts – from a diet of seaweed and roo poo to burp masks

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Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, amateur space explorer and one of the richest people on the planet, has joined the race to stop cows farting – and save the planet. 
The $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund, which funds research into tackling climate change, has donated $9.4 million to a project at the Pirbright Institute in Surrey, which is trying to develop a vaccine that will reduce the amount of methane-producing microbes in the stomachs of cows.  
“This project represents a moonshot in our efforts to reduce livestock methane emissions,” says Dr Andy Jarvis, the director of the Future of Food at the Bezos Earth Fund.
Bovine flatulence and burping is considered so environmentally dangerous that it is currently being tackled by many teams of scientists all around the world with many different approaches. Some may sound as if dreamed up by an over-imaginative nine-year-old, but they’re absolutely real…
The global herd comprises roughly 1.6 billion cows, each with four stomachs (or, technically, one quadripartite stomach), the largest part of which is the rumen. The rumen of an adult cow can hold roughly 200 litres and is packed with billions of bacteria that break down the vegetal matter their cow host consumes. 
(As an aside, many bovine digestion experiments are conducted on cows that have been fitted with a cannula, providing a kind of porthole in the side of the animal that allows scientists to reach into the rumen.)
The process produces hydrogen and carbon dioxide, which are combined by enzymes and microbes to form methane, a gas that escapes from both ends of a cow in a never-ending series of farts and burps. A particularly bilious bovine can happily expel over 300 litres of methane a day – enough to fill a medium-sized bathtub (at room temperature and pressure).
Combine all these “enteric methane emissions” (to give the problem its scientific term), and you get a foetid miasma blanketing the planet. Research suggests methane is the second most emitted greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide and 30 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere.
Yet past attempts to develop a vaccine have been thwarted by the fact that cows’ microbiomes are different in different parts of the world. This makes it hard to create a universal vaccine that can deal with the wide variety of methane-producing bacteria. These wily microbes have also demonstrated the ability to become resistant to chemical inhibitors over time. 
Studies have found that feeding cows seaweed can suppress the enzyme that catalyses the methane-producing process, reducing emissions by around 80 per cent. 
Unfortunately cows aren’t crazy about  the taste of seaweed. Fortunately this can be covered up with molasses – a spoonful of sugar helps the algae go down – and the additives don’t alter the taste of the cow’s milk. However, it is hard to grow and process enough of the right kind of seaweed. Governments have been slow to issue the requisite marine licences. 
Zelp, a UK-based company, has come up with a burp-catching mask, which fits over a cow’s head and channels the methane emanating from its mouth and nostrils to an oxidation mechanism. It works somewhat like a rudimentary catalytic converter on a car, breaking down the gas. 
Unfortunately, the by-products include carbon dioxide (better than methane but still a greenhouse gas). Happily, the device can also be used to monitor the animal’s health, location and sexual receptiveness. 
A Norwegian company called N2 Applied has designed a plasma gun that fires artificial lightning at cow dung. The technology adds nitrogen from the air into slurry, to produce a nitrogen-enriched organic fertiliser. Experiments conducted at a farm in Berkshire found that zapping cow poo in this way reduced methane by 99 per cent while also reducing ammonia levels. 
Some scientists believe that the fault lies not in the feed but in the cows themselves and it might be possible to breed animals that are less gassy. Rainer Roehe, a professor of animal genetics at Scotland’s Rural College, has identified 20 bovine genes that he believes are associated with methane production. “There’s a large variation in methane production between individual animals,” he told Wired magazine. His plan is to work with British farmers to genetically select less flatulent cows in order to breed low-emission cattle. 
One particularly promising experiment conducted by scientists at Washington State University involves creating a microbial culture from baby kangaroo faeces, combining it with methane inhibitors and feeding the mix into a cow stomach simulator. The bugs in baby roo guts produce not methane but acetic acid, which is absorbed by the animal rather than emitted and has been shown to aid muscle growth thereby making the cows, well, beefier.
Behavioural scientists in Germany have trained cows to push through a designated gate and urinate in an AstroTurf-covered pen that has inevitably been nicknamed a “MooLoo”. Like cow farts, cow pee (cows can produce up to 30 litres per day) is a problem, leaching into rivers and other waterways, encouraging algal blooms that reduce oxygen levels in the water and kill wildlife.
“The cows are at least as good as children, aged two to four years,” says Dr Lindsay Matthews, an animal behavioural scientist at the University of Auckland. Unfortunately, this is no solution to the methane problem. Cows can’t be trained not to burp or fart, notes Dr Matthews. “They would blow up.”
Cow farts are no laughing matter. At the COP27 summit in 2022, Frans Timmermans, the vice president of the European Commission, described tackling methane emissions as “the cheapest and fastest way to slow down global warming”. 
At COP26 in 2021, over 100 countries pledged to reduce their methane emissions by 30 per cent by the end of the decade. More countries have since signed on. One obvious way to hit these targets would be to breed fewer cows. However, the world’s appetite for burgers and milkshakes is only growing more rapacious. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN has predicted that beef and dairy consumption could increase by 70 per cent over the next 30 years. 
So we may have to rest our hopes on Jeff Bezos and the cow fart jab. Or, failing that, baby kangaroo poo. 
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