(27 Mar 2017) LEADIN:
Scientists say cattle and sheep farmers can begin to control their massive contribution to greenhouse gases and global warming by feeding their animals more high value, nutritious plants.
The claims are made in a new report which claims our targets to reduce global warming can be met if farming in high risk areas is made to change.
STORYLINE:
Lush green grass and healthy, well fed cows.
The image is a pastoral ideal which has persevered through time, but scientists say it can't last, not unless farming across the world starts to change.
According to today's report, global warming will make farming in some regions extremely difficult, particularly as the demand for western meat rich diets is increasing across Africa and Asia.
Researchers from the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew say they've reached the conclusion after examining scores of studies on local farming techniques and projected methane emissions from colleagues around the world.
Cows, sheep, goats, buffalo and antelopes are ruminents and they create methane from the way they digest food.
While they graze, cows store the plants within their rumen, an area of their stomach where the vegetation is broken down by fermentation.
This is regurgitated and chewed before digestion.
Inside the rumen, micro organisms which break down the plant matter produce methane, the vast majority of this is belched out in the animal's breath.
Feed which is high in nutritive value is processed by cows more quickly than coarser plants which take longer and produce more gas.
This is the Nakhon Sawan area of Thailand during a drought last May.
The lake here dried up and the cattle fed on plants that were able to survive these parched conditions.
The author of the report released in the online journal Biogeosciences is Dr. Mark Lee from London's Royal Botanic Gardens Kew.
He says: "Agriculture as a whole produces about fifteen percent of the greenhouse gas emissions which are associated with human activity and the largest contributor to that fact is ruminent livestock, cattle sheep and goats and they produce methane in huge quantities and this is one of the main reasons our planet is warming up and methane is around 21 to 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide."
Trying to target meat eaters is not an economically viable option according to Lee.
Lee's report claims consumption is on the rise particularly in Asia and Africa, but he admits it is difficult to make exact forecasts when it comes to greenhouse gases like methane.
He says: "This is particularly true in the developing world so there's a huge demand for western meat rich diets, particularly across places like Asia and Africa where the growth in meat consumption is huge and we don't know an awful lot about what those livestock are actually eating and the nutritional value of those forage plants."
In the period between 1961 and 2014 global meat production increased from 71 milllion tonnes to 318 million tonnes and the value of livestock farming rose according to Lee's report.
But Lee says: "Meat consumption is a global asset worth about 1.4 trillion dollars (US) to the global economy and it employs, or sustains about 1.3 billion people. So meat consumption actually isn't going away, but what we need to do is farm more sustainably instead, that's a better option, but it is true that meat particularly ruminent meat like beef is around 250 times more damaging to the environment in terms of greenhouse gas emissions than some crops."
The result is a lower production of meat and milk and higher methane.

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