Project Objective

To understand the influence genetics has on methane emissions, whether it can be reduced through genetic selection, and examine its relationship to other traits including efficiency for growth and maintenance, feed intake, lifetime productivity, and beef quality. That could be used to better understand cow efficiency. 

Project Timeline

This is a five-year project with an anticipated completion date of 2030.

Project Activities

1. Build Chambers (Year 1) — Leveraging technology that has been widely deployed in sheep, New Zealand partners have demonstrated how a Portable Accumulation Chamber (PAC) can provide practical solutions to capture methane.  This project will refine the PAC design for beef cattle, considering specific in-country requirements and opportunities – i.e. size, age and weight of the animals. Once designed, PAC construction will commence with the aim of deploying 30 units in the U.S. and 30 units in Australia and four in the United Kingdom. New Zealand already has PACs available (Figure 1 & 2). Measurement protocols and data collection protocols will be established for the project during activity 1.  

2. Ask for Volunteers (Year 1-5) — AGI will actively pursue volunteers interested in participating in the research from across the Angus community representing diverse regions and varying forage and grazing environments. At this stage, no specific breeders have been selected.

3. Collect Data (Year 2-5) — Utilizing the PAC technology developed in activity 1, the methane measurement records paired with genotypes will be collected. The number of records matches within country capabilities which is also generally aligned with the size and influence of the respective beef cattle populations in each country.  The number of records increases over years as the PACs developed in activity 1 are scaled up to full capacity and recording protocols are streamlined. In total, the AGI will collect 7,000 total measurements (4,600 records, funded by the Bezos Earth Fund grant, will be anonymized and submitted to the Global Methane Genetics initiative, an independent committee of the Global Methane Hub). Samples for rumen microbial analyses will be collected from 20% sub-sample of animals across locations. Different microbial communities are known to produce varying levels of methane – subsampling may help to clarify the influence of these microbial factors.

4. Analyze and Report Findings (Year 5) — Working collaboratively across international research teams, the analysis pipeline will be built to estimate research breeding values from the data. The development pipeline includes the establishment of trait definition. Methane alone is difficult to select for and needs to be considered along with other traits such as level of performance, lifetime productivity, or feed intake. Understanding the relationship of this trait to others will help determine the trait definition. The pipeline also includes data edits and the genetic model definition. Once established, multi-country within-breed genetic evaluations and research breeding values will be delivered for industry review.