Reducing Dairy Emissions With Design

ZELP (Zero Emissions Livestock Project) is a London-based company working on developing cattle-wearable technology to reduce methane emissions in the agricultural sector – the largest methane emitting sector globally - and so the problem we are helping address is a large one. The demand for animal protein is increasing, in part due to a growing world population, but also due to developing societies accessing animal protein for the very first time as they break away from poverty. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations predicts an increase of 70% in demand for beef and dairy products by 2050, a figure that puts tremendous pressure on our food system, and on our capacity to deal with the substantial emissions associated with the production of these goods.

High-emitting sectors like energy and transport have shown over the years great capacity to rapidly reduce emissions with tangent and implementable solutions. Other sectors, including agriculture, remain harder to abate. One of the biggest challenges within the agricultural sector is to achieve reliable inventorying of greenhouse gases. Take entericfermentation methane as an example; Cattle produce anywhere from 70-150kg of methane a year, and understanding how much methane these animals produce is a hard task requiring spot-measurements in low volumes (typically 4-8 animals at a time) in specialised chambers then later extrapolated to a vast number of animals. The spread and uncertainty in the measurements are large – within the gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.

The way our technology works is by routing the methane-packed bovine exhalations through a catalytic arrangement embodied on a wearable device for cattle. By catalytically oxidising the methane the animals expel, we convert this methane into carbon dioxide and water vapour, a stream of gases that warms our planet significantly less (methane has a global warming potential that is 85 times higher than carbon dioxide, when measured over 20 years). Reductions of methane are tracked in real-time, and all data is transmitted via LoRa into gateways located on-farm for farmers and project developers to access.

On a yearly basis, the company looks to certify emissions reduced – under carbon methodologies currently in the development process – for beef and dairy companies to reduce scope-3 emissions, those occurring in the value chain of the company. Additionally, in scenarios where processors are not looking to keep the insets, these certified emission reductions can be traded in the voluntary or compliance carbon markets to help companies in different sectors achieve their emissions reduction targets. The transparency in our approach ensures ZELP only certifies what has been oxidised, nullifying the risk for over-issuance of credits.

Other ways of reducing methane in the agricultural space would normally involve feed supplements – organic or chemical formulations – which need to be pre-mixed into the animal feed. A key challenge that arises, however, is how to dose these additives in systems where cattle are atpasture, and where farmers are not feeding controlled rations. ZELP’s technology, on the other hand, can play a key role in addressing large quantities of methane gas, both in housed and grazing cattle.

This way of addressing methane emissions, requires us to craft a wearable system that puts the animals front and centre of our design process. A key component of ZELP’s missions is to improve welfare on-animal while methane emissions are reduced. The way the company approaches this is via tracking and processing an array of health, performance, and reproductive parameters that can point towards early onsets of disease – preventing these conditions from escalating, and helping farmers save on veterinary visits, antibiotics, and yieldloss.

To materialise solutions in the agricultural space, one should understand first the realities of stakeholders involved in agricultural supply chains. Farmers are facing a complex challenge that can be tackled with the appropriate investment. Margins, however, are often too low for farmers to embrace solutions at a cost for them. Beef and dairy processors, who in most cases have aggressive emissions reduction pledges (from net zero to carbon positive), are facing the hard task of reducing scope-3 emissions (mainly methane exhaled by cattle in their supply chains). Solutions to these emissions represent a high cost for these companies too. As years go by, the key question continues to be how should cost absorption unfold for solutions that impact a whole supply chain: from farmers all the way down to the retailers and end-consumers.

While it is clear that a challenge of the magnitude of agricultural methane will not be solved by one approach, but rather a combination of efforts and solutions, we are excited to play a role in the decarbonisation of this hard-to-abate sector.

Francisco Norris

Francisco Norris is an Argentinian-Italian design technologist based in London. He holds a Master’s Degree in Information Experience Design from the Royal College of Art, and has experience developing technology for Google, Panasonic, and the British Paraorchestra amongst others. Francisco is the founder of Zero Emissions Livestock Project (ZELP), and currently leads a team of designers, engineers and scientists in the development of an innovative technology to neutralise cattle methane emissions in real time, while gathering unique data to increase welfare and productivity on-farm.