Washington state is home to about 1.17 million head of cattle, including calves. 

House Bill 1630, considers our cattle herd as a significant contributor to climate change through methane emissions. Why? According to the bill, because methane emissions specifically from the “digestion process and manure production” of cattle are not required to be tracked or reported but “the legislature finds cattle release significant amounts of methane.”

This kind of backward logic from our legislature has plagued the farming and ranching community of our state for years.

There is an abundance of research showing methane from livestock is not as harmful to the atmosphere as it was once believed nor is it as prevalent. Methane from livestock is part of the “biogenic carbon cycle,” meaning plants can absorb it when it is broken down into carbon dioxide and sequester it. 

The bill goes on to require the Clean Air Act to be amended to require dairies and feedlots to track methane emissions and report them annually to the Washington State Department of Ecology. 

Here, too, is a problem in the legislation. Tracking methane emissions from livestock is not as simple as tracking the miles put on a car. Researchers use emissions “sniffing” sensors in a complex fencelike structure around livestock pens or use a representative sample of livestock to estimate total emissions in a respiration chamber. Neither of these methods of emissions tracking are meant to be used in commercial conditions on a dairy or feedlot.

Cattle are among the greatest upcyclers of forage foods in the barnyard. They can make numerous products that would otherwise be considered useless useful by turning them into food through fermented digestion – boiled, or spent, grains from the brewing or distilling process, pressed apples from juicing, the hulls of cotton. The difficulty of digestion of each item, in turn, determines how much or how little cattle burp.

One of the most studied food additives for cattle to reduce methane is red seaweed, specifically A. taxiformis a tropical red algae. The additive has no effect on milk or meat yield but has been shown to reduce methane emissions in research settings by up to 55 percent in dairy cattle and 98 percent in beef cattle. A more common, and potentially readily accessible feed additive, is tannins, which are most associated with wine. However, they are also found in berries and, when provided in the proper amounts, have been shown to reduce methane emissions from livestock by 13-16 percent.

Bills like HB 1630 are uneducated and harmful at best. Whether regulating methane emissions from cattle or something else, as more laws are heaped onto our farms and ranches, more farms and ranches are likely to be relocated out of state. The notion of “business-friendly” environments will, eventually, become a discussion in agriculture, just as it is in every other business.

Drought, wildfire, changes in our weather patterns, these are all things people should be paying attention to. Forcing our dairy producers and feedlot operators to report the methane emissions of their livestock is not going to fix climate change nor will it benefit the state to add yet another report to the shelf at the Department of Ecology.