UNL to study cattle impacts on climate change

By Maria Tibbetts, UNL & edited by Clint Peck

There’s an adage that says, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” And for many years the cattle industry has been asked to manage, reduce or even eliminate greenhouse gas emissions produced by its cows.

Now a team led by Galen Erickson, professor of ruminant nutrition and leader of the Beef Innovation hub at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is launching a project to develop technology to accurately measure greenhouse gas emissions from grazing cattle.

Erickson’s team recently received a five-year, $5 million Grand Challenges grant from the university to study climate impacts of cattle grazing systems at three of the university’s research facilities.

“The goal of the project is to develop tools that can be easily and economically employed to help predict the benefits and any situations where we can improve relative to greenhouse gas in grazing systems,” Erickson said.

Derek McLean, dean of the UNL’s Agricultural Research Division, said the university recognizes how important the beef industry is to the state economically and ecologically.

Homer Buell, a beef producer from Rose, Nebraska, and former co-chair of the Beef Innovation hub, was involved in the grant proposal. “It’s really important that we know what impact we are having on greenhouse gases,” Buell said.

Related: Our most recent edition

The project focuses on how much the greenhouse gas levels around grazing cattle change, rather than just how much the cattle produce. The growing vegetation and soil in a grazing system take up greenhouse gases, which affects how much greenhouse gas is in the atmosphere.

Research tools have been used for years to measure variations in the gases associated with crop production. The “carbon” in many environmental conversations refers to carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas plants convert into oxygen.

However, the system of carbon credits is based on assumptions about how much carbon dioxide is being absorbed by the soil versus how much is being produced. The project is designed to provide some certainty for establishing practices that positively affect greenhouse gas levels so if producers do enter those contracts, the expectations are realistic, and science based.

“Part of the problem has been research that was not done or not done right, so things came out that maybe weren’t real,” Buell said. “We have to find out what’s real and affect that as positively as we can.

Watch for our video interview with Galen Erickson on this topic.