Reducing harmful emissions from cows using genetics

Dairy farming can have negative effects on the environment, polluting waterways with an excess of nitrogen that can have long-term impacts. Past work has addressed this problem by looking at ways to reduce the cow’s urinary urea nitrogen concentration, but this has involved mitigation techniques that paint the cow as the problem rather than the solution. Cameron Marshall, a PhD student under Prof Pablo Gregorini at Lincoln University, New Zealand, investigates how cow genetics may hold the key to reducing the environmental impact of pastoral livestock production.Read more about their work in Research Outreach, or read the original paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.139994