Breath analysis offers a quick assay of methane output in dairy cows

A new paper titled Non-invasive individual methane measurement in dairy cows is published in the journal Animal. The paper underscores that any attempt to lower CH₄ and carbon footprint of milk production via breeding requires accurate measurement of CH₄ in large-scale and on individual cows. So far, the lack of reliable techniques for the measurement of CH₄ particularly from individual cows on large scale can be a hindrance to its mitigation. Besides, many of the available techniques to date are invasive, slow, expensive, labour intensive and are unsuitable for large-scale measurements. The main objectives of the paper were to examine and develop a non-invasive CH₄ measurement system based on the breath analysis in dairy cows. The study in this paper used sampling and analysis of CH₄ from the breath samples of cows using F10 portable multigas analyser (Gasera Ltd, Turku, Finland) to determine daily CH₄ production. Comparisons of the technique with cattle chamber measurements and measurements from widely used prediction models were also made. The paper highlighted that breathe analysis techniques could be valuable to provide a quick assay of CH₄ output on an individual animal basis and on a large scale at relatively low establishment and maintenance costs. It has also recommended that a better design to provide an ideal validation platform and developing correction factors to account for the loss from hind gut fermentation could improve the agreement between the methods.

The paper has been selected as article of the month for the month of May by the International journal Animal and for a summary see at: http://blog.journals.cambridge.org/2017/05/12/breath-analysis-offers-a-quick-assay-of-methane-output-in-dairy-cows/.

For the full paper see Non-invasive individual methane measurement in dairy cows.