Climate-Friendly Cows Put New Zealand at Center of Global Methane Fight

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
You're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio.

**Carol Massar** (0:14)
Well, late last year, Bloomberg reported that the world remains far behind global commitments to slash methane. That's according to a UN assessment, United Nations assessment that underscores the need for rapid aggressive work to stifle emissions of the super pollutant. You don't know methane is a highly potent greenhouse gas with roughly 80 times the heat trapping power of carbon dioxide in the first 20 years after it is released, so it sticks around for a long time. And stemming it is seen as essential to keep the world's temperature rise and check and avoid critical tipping points. And as we know, a lot comes from cows.

**Bailey Lipshultz** (0:49)
A lot comes from cows, and those cows often live in New Zealand.

**Carol Massar** (0:53)
They do indeed. They've been working on this a lot, creating, yes, climate friendly cows. We're going to get into that in just a moment. We do head to Wellington, New Zealand, and Bloomberg News reporter, Tracy Withers, where it's pretty early in the morning. Tracy, thank you so much. We've been talking about this story in the newsroom, so we are so glad you could join us. What's going on in New Zealand? First of all, give us the backdrop, because there is a lot of cattle, and farming and ag is certainly very important to the New Zealand economy.
But that means a lot of methane gas.

**Tracy Withers** (1:23)
Yes, good morning. Certainly, exports of all milk need are pretty significant in the New Zealand economy, as you've just said.
But equally, methane emissions from what we call ruminants, or cows and sheep and cattle make up about 40 percent of our total emissions down in New Zealand. We don't have as much coal burning and so forth. So the government has been pretty focused on coming out with solutions to achieve its methane or greenhouse gas reduction targets by funding research and trying to work out ways that the cows and the sheep can still grow but not produce as much.

**Bailey Lipshultz** (2:07)
Yeah, Tracy, walk us through some of those options. Just thinking, okay, well, you want the cows to be able to produce things like milk and ultimately be eaten, but you can't just kill them, I guess. Walk us through what's going on.

**Tracy Withers** (2:20)
Well, that's right. I mean, one solution clearly would be to reduce the size of the herds and the flocks to reduce the overall methane output, but that would impact New Zealand's economy quite severely. So there's a range of research projects funded by a government agency. Well, it's a government agency that's co-funded with a lot of dairy processes, rural banks and other interested parties. So it's a public-private partnership.
They're looking at a range of things like vaccines, feed additives, probiotics, changing the grasses that the animals eat, or their desire to reduce methane. Some of these products are getting close to being available commercially.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:10)
Yeah.

**Carol Massar** (3:11)
You talk about this company, Ruminant, if I'm saying it correctly, Biotech, and about a capsule placed in an animal's stomach that slowly releases a compound to suppress production of methane. I mean, it sounds funny. We laugh about it in the newsroom and whenever this story comes up, I don't know if it does in your newsroom as well. But it's a serious problem when we think about what impacts the climate. We've been talking about the climate a lot lately this week coming off of a lot of excessive temperatures and again, excessive rains, impacts certainly on a lot of states across the country. I know we've also seen a heat wave across Europe as well.
Talk to us too about the Cool Sheep program. This is the actual breeding of low methane livestock. I think about genetics and genetic engineering. Tell us a little bit about what you found out on that specifically.

**Tracy Withers** (4:10)
Well, certainly, whether it's genetic engineering is a point, I guess, but certainly there are breeding programs and quite a lot of research going on into both sheep and cattle in terms of finding out animals that produce, that still grow and produce the meat and the milk that's obviously necessary, but do so by emitting less methane. And I did visit a farm, a research farm in the middle of the North Island here in New Zealand where they have cattle, they weigh them every week.
They are in an open barn, which in New Zealand, of course, is unusual. Most of the animals, almost all the animals in New Zealand are pasture growing. So the manager there referred to this establishment as an animal hilton because the animals are under shelter in the middle of winter, getting fed, getting weighed, and their methane is measured on a daily basis. The idea being that you don't want animals emitting less methane, but not growing and producing the milk and meat that's needed.