These Illinois Dairy and Beef Farms Make Raising Methane-Belching Cows Part of the Climate Solution

By Adriana Pérez

Illinois is a top agricultural state, generating billions of dollars annually, but even where stalks of corn and acres of soybean vastly outnumber its 400,000 head of cattle, cows raised for beef and dairy account for an outsize portion of the industry's methane emissions.

A single cow raised for meat produces between 154 and 264 pounds of methane per year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, meaning 333,000 beef cattle in Illinois last year could have released between 51 million and 88 million pounds of methane into the atmosphere. This is equivalent to emissions from 151,000 to 260,700 gasoline-powered cars driven in one year.

Cattle produce this powerful, heat-trapping gas through a digestive process called enteric fermentation, which represents over 25% of greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector.

As climate change from human activities intensifies, experts say addressing this source of emissions by implementing sustainable and innovative practices from diet additives to regenerative grazing can offer quick wins in the fight against global rising temperatures, which is already presenting new challenges to raising cattle.

Cows can spend over eight hours a day regurgitating their partially digested meals to chew again. As bacteria break down food in a specialized stomach, the process releases methane, which cows then belch into the air. It's part of a natural cycle as the gas is returned to the ground by plants when it converts back into carbon dioxide after 12 years in the atmosphere.

This means the greenhouse gas is "created, and destroyed or absorbed, at kind of a relatively similar rate," said Josh McCann, associate professor of animal sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who leads research into nutrition for beef cattle. "And yet, our environmental, atmospheric methane is not going down. It's increasing pretty rapidly."

"That cycle doesn't exist in a bubble. And what we know is that other sources of methane have significantly increased," said John Tauzel, associate vice president of global agriculture methane at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. These other sources include fossil fuels such as natural gas, oil wells and coal mines, as well as waste from landfills and water treatment.

An often-used analogy equates methane being released into the atmosphere to water running from a faucet into a bathtub, Tauzel said, which people use to argue: "As long as the methane coming into the atmosphere is equal to the methane going out of the atmosphere into the bathtub, out of the bathtub we're all set, the world is fine."

"The problem is, we don't have one faucet from cow (methane) coming into the world, into the bathtub. We have multiple faucets now, and we're turning those up, actually," he said. "So that the global budget, the global outcome of methane, is now overflowing. We have way too much."

Atmospheric methane concentrations have more than doubled over the last two centuries, contributing to up to a third of global temperature increases since the Industrial Revolution. Most methane comes from human activities, of which 40% is from agriculture, 35% from oil and gas production and 20% from landfill waste.

President Donald Trump's U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced in late November it would delay Biden-era deadlines for the oil and gas industry to limit methane emissions. Earlier in September, the agency proposed a new rule to end the greenhouse gas reporting program for large emitters, including landfills, even as population growth has led to more waste.