Cattle are a major contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and research has found that the red seaweed Asparagopsis mixed with regular feed at a rate of 100g per cow per day reduces methane production by 90%.<\/p>\n
Sustainable agriculture company CH4 has gained approval to sell the feed in Australia and plans to build its first two facilities in the Yorke and Eyre Penisulas with further \u2018eco-parks\u2019 planned in the future.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve defined what we call an eco-park and the minimum size that makes sense is 20 hectares of aquaculture space in the water and two hectares on land containing a hatchery to grow the seedlings and a facility for processing,\u201d said CH4 Global chief executive, Dr Steve Mellor.<\/p>\n
The benefits are not confined to reducing methane. \u201c[The eco-parks] also do things like reduce ocean acidification, reduce excess nutrients in the water from agricultural runoff from waste from an existing tuna or kingfish farms,\u201d said Dr Mellor.<\/p>\n
Asparagopsis works by interfering with the last stage of methane production in a cow\u2019s stomach. \u201cIf the methane is blocked you\u2019ve got 12 to 15 per cent more calories retained in the cow for the same amount of food,\u201d explained Dr Mellor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Construction of the first farm and processing plant to turn red seaweed into a feed supplement for cows to reduce their methane production is expected to begin next year in South Australia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5037,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-5036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquaculture"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5036"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5038,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5036\/revisions\/5038"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5036"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=5036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}