Climate change is a global challenge, but interventions can only be implemented locally. Understanding the local cultures, economies, politics, language, and production systems is critical for any intervention to make an impact. Across the developing world the greatest opportunity to limit livestock methane emissions and improve food security is through improved animal nutrition and livestock genetics. In the developed world the opportunity lies in absolute methane emission reductions with...

Reducing methane emissions is the greatest opportunity to limit warming in the short term. With roughly 30% of current temperature increases are caused by methane, global food systems being responsible for 60% of methane emissions as a continuum from production to waste, and  80% of recent emissions have come from non-OECD countries  the methane challenge intimately linked to the International development challenge. To address this solution that are fit for purpose need to be developed. With...

Recent farmer protests across Europe have highlighted the political battleground around sustainable agriculture. The absence of effective policies and support for a just transition to Net Zero is positioning farmers as political pawns who are being exploitation by people outside the farming community pushing their own agendas. Farmers are increasingly being squeezed between decreasing margins, increasing costs, increasing regulations, less market power.  At the same time the growing...

The climate impact of animal agriculture is only one of the aspects that needs to be addressed for sustainable productions systems. The importance and urgency to mitigate methane emissions must be integrated with the social and economic aspects of livestock production and the other environmental issues such as nutrient management and biodiversity.  The current state of our food systems are the result of decades and even centuries of the choices people have made which will take time to...

Growing anthropocentrism is one of the underlying root causes of our ecological crisis. In recent decades humans have become increasingly disconnected from our food. While for thousands of years obtaining food and water was the top priority of most human societies. Today, this is no longer the case and in today's society food is increasing becoming an a political issue, especially for meat and animal products. I recently caught up with Dr Sparsha Saha from Harvard University to discuss...

Less than 5% of climate finance is focused on addressing methane, and less than 2% of that finance is for the livestock sector. This is despite the fact that 155 countries agreed that rapidly reducing methane emissions from energy, agriculture, and waste is  the single most effective strategy to keep the goal of limiting warming to 1.5˚C. The EPA estimates that 37% of methane emissions are from agriculture, with livestock contributing 32% of those emissions.  Low and middle income countries...

Of the 25 countries that are least able to adapt to the impacts of climate change about 14 of those countries or 56% are currently affected by armed conflict. The intersection of conflict and food insecurity is an area of series concern in many of the places where the International Committee of the Red Cross works. The 2023 global report of food crises reported that around 250 million people globally were food insecure and in need of urgent food assistance. This is the highest level in the...

Currently over 50% of the world’s population is undernourished. There is generally not a shortage of food calories but a shortage of nutrients. This issue exists in rich countries, middle income countries, and poor countries. The traditional solution that has provided these nutrients to human populations for thousands of years is animals, both farmed livestock and hunted wild species. In recent decades the vast increase in the numbers of farmed livestock and how they are produced has created...

Everyday choices are made about the food we eat by all 8 billion people on the planet. These choices impact our health and the health of the environment and climate. But what drives us to make the decisions we do and what would need to be done to change our decision making to improve both our health and reduce the environmental impact of food production.  I recently caught up with Prof. Barbara Mullan from Curtin University to discuss these issues. Most of us know that many of the things we...

Creating a win win for farmers/ranchers and the environment would be game changing across the whole livestock climate space. The key is to understand the kinetics of methane production by the rumen microbiome and identify opportunities to capture that energy within the animal for production. This approach mitigates methane emissions and decreases feed costs. Plus, creating this win win overcomes the not insignificant implementations/uptake challenge.  Methane is the end point of a whole...

Management is the greatest limitation to reducing the environmental impact of livestock systems. Farming is managing an ecosystem. When we work with nature to manage that ecosystem, then nature works with us to improve the water cycle, improve the nutrient cycle, and to sequester more carbon in the soil. The challenge is, how do we improve every individual farmer understanding of their landscapes, the ecology, and businesses so they are managing their properties in an optimal manner....

Microbes communicate, they make decisions, they collaborate, and they fight. Sometimes they are good guys and other times they are bad guys. Understanding the importance of individual species withing the ecosystem and how species interact is critical for navigating our food sustainability challenges. The good news is that animals with higher feed efficiency produce less methane. However, our understanding of the ecological forces driving that double benefit is limited and the natural...

Humans are the cause of climate change.  Climate change is also biodiversity loss, desertification, mega fires and climate change that are all feeding off each other and spiralling out of control.  The way humans manage fossil fuels, livestock, and the the environment is what is leading to the continual degradation of the natural world.  In the 1960's Allan initiated an elephant culling program in an effort to protect native habitats in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe today) from over grazing. The...

The question of what is a good microbiome all depends on the perspective you are asking. The answer differs if your lens from the perspective of the animal, humans, the microbes, or the climate. The relationships are complex. Microbes produce vital energy and nutrients for the animal. They allow our grazing animals to transform fibrous herbs, shrubs, and grasses into nutrient dense food. They recycle plant carbon and nutrients back into the soils.  Since the first ruminants evolved around 50...

Climate policy has been weaponised in Australia over recent decades. The situation in other countries is frequently not dissimilar. The lack of real action on climate change resulted in over one third of Australian voters rejecting the major parties in preference of environmentally progressive ‘Teal’ independents at the 2022 federal election. Zoe Daniel is one of seven Teal Independent who are now working to drive positive and constructive climate policy changes across the Australian Federal...

We are always going to have emissions from growing food. There is no way agriculture can get to zero emissions. More than any other industry climate change affects agriculture and agriculture effects climate change. Britt Groosman leads efforts to decrease the environmental footprint of food production at the Environmental defense Fund (https://www.edf.org/). The initial focus are the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters, the United States, China, India, and Europe. Her team concentrates...

There is arguably more land under the management of people producing beef, sheep, and goats than under any other industry. Having access to all these people and the land they manage provides an opportunity to impact a significant percentage of the world’s land area. Creating the incentives to encourage and reward climate friendly and nature positive livestock management practices is both one of the greatest challenges and largest opportunities to limit global warming. The Global Roundtable...

When Lance Baumgard first started working with the Arizona dairy industry, he quickly noticed the existing dogma around metabolic disease, inflammatory disease, and animal productivity didn’t stack up. Questioning why the aggressive attempts to treat metabolic disease over the previous 30 years had led to no reduction in disease incidence he concluded that the industry could be focusing on the symptoms rather than the cause. Cellular health is key to maintaining productivity and...

The concern is not just climate change itself but how climate change relates to other parts of our society. Our current political and societal system is not able to deal with the complex interactions between all the issues. Population growth, climate change, the pandemic, economic crisis, energy transition, supply chain disruption, and the conflict in Eastern Europe are all being dealt with reactively and as components, with security implications for our country and our region.  Many current...

When a delegate stood up and said to the audience “I just can’t understand why a strategy of cheap food could ever be wrong,” at a 1995 Common Agricultural Policy conference no one questioned the wisdom of this statement.  Almost 30 years later, this and other well ingrained paradigms are being re-evaluated. The big questions are whether cheap food is sufficiently valued by our society and how much does cheap food drive increased food waste. Current USDA estimates are that between 30-40% of...

There’s a battle going on in the rumen of all cattle over hydrogen. When the methanogens are winning, livestock methane emissions rise, and milk and meat production decrease. When the acetogens win, milk and meat production increase, and methane emissions decline. The best opportunity available to limit the climate impact of our food systems and provide highly nutritious food to the world’s population is to resolve this hydrogen war within our cattle and sheep. Professor Sharon Huws is a...

High tech production systems can produce highly nutrient dense foods. Food processing is a technology, it’s an enabler. It’s the formulations that are usually the conundrum.   Every component in food has an important role to play. There are thousands of biologically active compounds above and beyond the few dozen essential nutrients, vitamins, and minerals. These all work together to impact our health. We are only starting to scratch the surface on understanding how these all work together. A...

One or two healthy chickens can significantly improve the health and prosperity of marginalized communities. Poultry recycle food scraps and garden waste, forage insects and worms to produce eggs which provide much needed protein and income. The Kyeema Foundation (https://kyeemafoundation.org/) is working with some of the world’s poorest communities to protect household poultry from disease. Kyeema started out vaccinating village chickens across Africa and the Pacific to protect them from...