The advent of 'green' cattle.

The advent of 'green' cattle.Implications of livestock farming on climate change should not be drawn from aggregate statistics, reveals a study based on a new method of carbon footprinting for pasture-based cattle production systems that can assess the impacts of individual animals. The new method, developed by a team from the University of Bristol and Rothamsted Research, records the environmental impact of each animal separately before calculating the overall burden of a farm. Existing methods of carbon footprinting are primarily designed to quantify total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of a particular farm, and are therefore unable to provide information on environmental performances of specific animals. The ability to identify "green" cattle within a herd -- cattle that produce lower emissions per kilogram of liveweight gain -- promises more sustainable farming, they report in the study