New Zealand emerging as global laboratory for climate-friendly cows

New Zealand is testing methane-cutting technologies for livestock, aiming to reduce farm emissions while protecting agricultural exports and climate goals

New Zealand’s farms are set to become a real-life laboratory for one of agriculture’s toughest climate challenges — reducing the methane cows and sheep belch.  

After years of research and investment, the country is on the cusp of giving farmers the first of a new generation of tools to curb the amount of the greenhouse gas livestock emit. Whether they can be deployed at the scale and speed needed to meaningfully reduce emissions and satisfy climate goals remains uncertain. 

Ruminant BioTech is awaiting registration from the Ministry for Primary Industries for a bolus, a capsule placed in an animal’s stomach that slowly releases a compound to suppress production of methane. Research shows it can reduce emissions per animal by as much as 70 per cent. It may get approval as soon as next month. 

 

The Auckland-based company is one of a growing number of startups and researchers testing everything from methane-inhibiting compounds extracted from daffodils and probiotics known as Kowbucha — a nod to kombucha — to vaccines and selective breeding for lower-emitting livestock. Together, the technologies may reshape farming globally — if they can clear regulatory hurdles and gain widespread adoption. Reducing methane is a pressing challenge for New Zealand, one of the world’s highest per-capita emitters of the gas. Agriculture underpins the nation’s export economy, and methane produced by the digestive systems of cattle and sheep accounts for more than 40 per cent of the nation’s total greenhouse gases. Reducing emissions is also important for the nation’s food exporters seeking to convince customers like Nestle SA and McDonald’s that New Zealand’s dairy and meat deserve premium prices. 

Helping drive the effort is AgriZeroNZ, a public-private partnership established in 2023 to fund technologies, which has committed around NZ$80 million ($45 million) across 18 companies, projects and trials. That includes NZ$5.8 million in Ruminant BioTech, which was its first investment. “All the companies we’re investing in are now doing animal trials,” AgriZeroNZ Chief Executive Wayne McNee said in an interview. “We need to be doing things and we are doing things. That’s why we exist, to enable farmers to take action as opposed to just talking about it.” 

Last year, the government set a less ambitious methane reduction target of 14 per cent to 24 per cent below 2017 levels by 2050, down from a previous aim of a 24 per cent to 47 per cent reduction. The revised ambition was based on a controversial “no-additional-warming” approach that seeks to prevent methane from contributing any further to global warming rather than to reduce its impact. 

It was slammed by scientists, but hailed by farmers and was one of several the center-right coalition government has taken to support the agricultural sector. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon sees agric-ulture as the engi-ne of the econo- my and doesn’t want climate poli-cy to impede it. “We are focused on growth and we ain’t shutting down any farms in this country,” he told reporters last month.  

AgriZeroNZ effectively acts as a venture capital investor and has NZ$191 million to spend, funded equally from the government and ten industry players. Its investments include firms such as Agroceutical Products, which is exploring extracting a methane-inhibiting compound from daffodils, and US-based vaccine developer ArkeaBio, which has a trial under way at Texas A&M University. Dairy customers like Mars and Nestle are already prepared to pay a premium for lower-emission dairy products sourced from Fonterra or Synlait Milk. Key trade agreements with the UK and the European Union also require efforts to reduce emissions. “In some cases, if you don’t do something, you won’t get market access,” said McNee.  

To help speed adoption of methane-cutting technology, the government last month announced a further funding program of NZ$51 million over three years, to be matched by private partners, to help deploy the new tools.  “Genetics is a good way to do emissions reduction,” said Paul McGill, head of innovation and extension at Pamu Landcorp Farming, the state-owned farming company. “It’s baked in and then you just keep adding to it and you don’t have the cost each year” that vaccines and other inhibitors incur, he said. 

At a farm near Taupo, in the central North Island, Pamu has been monitoring cohorts of animals who spend eight weeks at a time in a specially designed barn. The data feeds breeding programs designed to develop faster-growing animals that emit less methane.