Researchers create game-changing tool to address hidden farmland threat: 'We wanted the tool to be as versatile as possible'
A new open-source software is making it easier than ever to monitor heat-trapping gases emitted by livestock, according to an Elsevier report published on Phys.org.
While much of the heat-trapping gas in the world is produced by burning fuel, another significant chunk of it comes from animal agriculture. As part of their digestive processes, animals like cows burp out methane, a potent planet-warming gas.
Exactly how much methane is produced and what factors change that amount is obviously difficult to track. Animals are often outdoors or in partially enclosed spaces, and their gases easily escape. But a device called GreenFeed helps track these emissions in real time. It uses feed pellet rewards to encourage livestock to put their heads inside the device, then tracks the gases they produce.
Then, users have the opposite problem: There is a lot of data about every burp produced by every individual animal.
"The sheer volume of data produced by GreenFeed systems can be really overwhelming," said Guillermo Martinez-Boggio, the lead author of the new article, per Elsevier. "We set out to create an open-source tool that simplifies this process, making it more efficient and reproducible, and flexible to the variety of situations in which these systems are used."
That tool is greenfeedr, based on the idea of "doing as little as possible by hand and as much as possible with functions." It helps download and sort through data from GreenFeed systems, compiling summaries about various types of data like an animal's total daily visits, how many pellets it's eaten, and the gas produced.
"We wanted the tool to be as versatile as possible, so it was designed to be used with all livestock species and housing systems, including freestall, tiestall, and pasture-based," said Martinez-Boggio.
The result makes it easier to understand how animals are producing heat-trapping gases, and that will make it easier to deploy solutions like this feed additive that cuts back on the methane in cow burps. One day, we may be able to bring down the Earth's overheating using this data.
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