UNITED STATES-MORE NONSENSE ABOUT FARTING CATTLE.
LAS CRUCES Someday, a drive south past all those South Valley dairies won’t require you to roll up the windows and leap for the "recirculated air" button on your dashboard.
At least, that’s the hope of executives at trade group Dairy Management Inc., who recently announced a project geared to reduce bovine intestinal methane mostly belches, some farts by 25 percent, possibly through feed additives or supplements that would target stomach microbes.
But the pitch, circulating for at least 19 years, when Colorado State University’s Donald Johnson proposed feed additives to cut down on methane, a greenhouse gas is leaving some in Doña Ana County skeptical.
"That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard," said C. O. Marricle, a nationally recognized agriculture educator who teaches fifth-grade at Fairacres Elementary in Las Cruces; he warns that any time feed is changed, milk and meat production is affected. "Why don’t we put a ban on frijoles, too?"
New Mexico is home to 172 dairies and 355,000 dairy cows, according to the Dairy Producers of New Mexico.
Doña Ana County is home to 91,000 cattle, almost 6 percent of the state’s total, according to the New Mexico Agricultural Statistics Service.
J. L. Gonzalez, owner of Gonzalez Dairy in Mesquite, has been pitched his fair share of products like a eucalyptus-perfume mister to counteract the smell of his 2,800 cows. He’s similarly skeptical of the feed-modification idea; there are already ingredients that some claim cows eat less of and produce less methane when eaten, but their efficacy is hit-and-miss, he said.
"There’s some merit to it, but, you know, the cow’s been developed over thousands of years to do what she wants. I don’t know if she’d care for some mad scientist changing the way she processes her feed," Gonzalez said. "Methane’s one of our naturally occurring gases. It’s coming out of the swamps, the volcanoes, the ground."
And though methane has potential to be burned like natural gas, decreasing it might be the wrong direction, he said.
"Cows need the energy and calories to grow a baby calf and produce milk for us," Gonzalez said. "If we decrease something that’s going to decrease the methane, it might mean that you also decrease the amount of milk, too."
That, in turn, cuts into profit, especially of the small companies, said J.D. Younker, who keeps about 20 head of cattle for roping and horse training.
"Like any livestock, already it’s a fairly substantial investment we make in their feed. Anything you change is going to increase that price, which would decrease profit margin, which impacts (consumer price)," Younker said.
There are better uses of methane anyway, he noted, recalling a visit in the early 1990s to a barn in Borken, Germany, that collected methane and converted it to electricity.
People have been trying to figure out how to make money off cow methane for ages, said Linda Armstrong, who works doing bookkeeping and environmental compliance at family-owned Big Sky Dairy in Vado, which keeps about 2,000 cows.
"We have a lot of companies coming around trying to put in things like (composting) digesters or manure-burning plants, but they always seem to fall through," Armstrong said. Currently, the EPA doesn’t limit cow-emitted methane as an air pollutant, Armstrong said, but she thinks it’s only a matter of time.
The focus on gassy cows isn’t entirely fair, Armstrong implied: "Of course we want to be as environmentally sound as we can be, but ... I would imagine there’s more people in the U.S. than cows. And we do the same thing they do."
