This is part one in a series about searching for solutions to the climate emergency. Read parts two, three, and four.
The UN’s COP27 climate summit opened with dire footage of 71 climate-induced disasters in the year to date and — just in case that didn’t hit home — a declaration from UN Secretary-General António Guterres that the world is on a “highway to climate hell”.
As global governments continue to drag their feet on climate action, in the coming days Crikey will chronicle Australians using climate science that is leagues ahead, ready for uptake, and ripe for scale.
First stop: seaweed science.
In 2020, global seaweed production from aquaculture (land and sea farms) topped 35 million tonnes. Most of this comes from South-East Asia, with China and Indonesia the two biggest players.
Australia’s contribution is close to zero, but we enter the market with new weeds, cutting-edge science, and a pot of $8.1 million of federal government funding to help shore up the budding industry.
What’s Australia’s edge?
Add 50 grams of Australia’s cow-friendly red seaweed — Asparagopsis — to a bale of hay and it eliminates methane production by 99%. Doing so also increases the cattles’ energy productivity by 10-20%. That means fewer emissions and less food required for a cow to perform its daily duties (produce milk or become meat).
The CSIRO has estimated that sneaking seaweed into the feed of 10% of global livestock producers is akin to removing 100 million cars off the roads and (courtesy of better powered livestock) could feed an additional 23 million people.
Let’s digest this.
Standard practice inside a cow’s (one, two, three, fourth) stomach is to break down material and release it as energy. But by doing so, the gut’s internal operators bind hydrogen molecules to carbon molecules, creating a perfect recipe for methane.
Propelled through burps, ruminant cattle account for about 6% of Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Open the floor to all livestock and that jumps to 10%.
But a ”squash ball”-sized batch of seaweed is enough to neutralise that. Adam Main, general manager of Australia’s first commercial seaweed supplier CH4 Global, said add seaweed into the feed mix and “their system fails” (in a good way).
“That means the carbon remains, the hydrogen remains, and the cow then uses the other things in its stomach to build them into other functional energy chains,” he says.
CH4Global is one of only three seaweed growers licensed by the CSIRO as part of FutureFeed (a seaweed supply chain established in 2020) to sell and supply the salty supplement to cattle producers. It’s been operating for three years, but only started sales this year.
Seaweed farming 101
Australia’s small but fast-growing seaweed industry is both land and sea-borne. Offshore it’s a similar game to mussel farming. It requires “ropes and floats” and not much else, says Main, who calls it “a self-sufficient crop”.
“While the seaweed’s in the water, it basically uses all the free things that are available in the marine space. It sucks up sunshine, nitrogen from the environment, and carbon,” he says.
Nitrogen is a common (and toxic) byproduct of fish farming. The nitrogen, carbon and sunshine feeders in CH4 Global’s farms grow as much as 20 metres in depth before they’re harvested using a “top-cut” technique that encourages regrowth. The seaweed snips are done manually from a boat, but Main anticipates the process will be totally automated in a few years. Divers still play a part but contending with great white sharks in South Australia is an occupational health and safety issue that Main says is best avoided by keeping people out of the water.
Once harvested, the seaweed is sedated with low light and a cold snap: “You’ve got to get it cool and keep it in the dark. And the seaweed effectively goes to sleep.”
From there, it’s out of the freezer and into the dryer. No different to freeze-dried strawberries or coffee.
Scaling up seaweed production
On land, aquaculture giant Tassal is pairing seaweed in its prawn ponds to boost water filtration. The trial is part of research at the University of the Sunshine Coast’s seaweed research group (the same team that revealed red seaweed could neutralise ruminating livestock) to expand the remit of Australia’s seaweed industry. Having “a Tassal” on board for research and development is seen as a win for an industry that “still doesn’t really exist”.
“We’re hoping to find other potential applications for the same seaweed so if we end up with a whole lot of Asparagopsis farmers in the country, they’re not just reliant on it for methane,” UniSC ecologist Professor Nick Paul says.
Pitching forward, CH4 Global is looking to ramp up its land-based operations as ocean environments are set to become increasingly volatile with the impacts of climate change. Temperature rises and increasing storm and swell surges are better managed on land.
“All of a sudden there’s a real proposition for us to be able to locate more systems on land in the region,” says Main. “Keep farming going, but in a very different way.”
My son’s part of the research group and working on this trial for his PhD. He’s also been collecting the Asparagopsis for a few years now. It helps he’s a qualified diver. There’s some very cool things in Asparagopsis.
Done doing the proud mother bragging.
Cattle (beef & dairy) and sheep farming still remain the highest resource use food agriculture – land, water & energy for grazing and feed production, transport and processing. There are increasing recommendations from health experts to reduce or eliminate meat consumption. Then there is the inherent animal cruelty – feed lots, bobby calves, slaughterhouses just to name a few. Who would be happy if someone told you they WANT to work in a slaughterhouse? More plant ag is the only real solution for a greener, cleaner, healthier, kinder future. Govts need to invest more in that future world.
How much methane comes from cattle in feedlots compared to cattle on pasture? Adding seaweed to feed in feedlots is obviously practical, but, in Australia, only about 6 percent of cattle methane is generated in feedlots. So we can reduce our
cattle methane by at most about 6 percent.
On the other hand, think of the forgone sequestration opportunities that are being sacrificed so that we can keep producing a product which causes thousands of bowel cancers annually, in Australia. Most of the area grazed heavily (aka “modified pasture” ~70 million hectares) would reforest if it was simply left alone … because it was cleared to begin with. Destocking also tackles the biggest cause of biodiversity loss in Australia … habitat loss. There are so many wins from phasing out
the ruminant industries: more carbon draw down, less habitat loss, less bowel cancer (about 50 percent less if you can phase out all red meat … including kangaroos and pigs).
As welcome as the eradication of inland cattle/sheep grazing would be, unfortunately the denuded, denatured and abused grazing lands would NOT “…reforest if it was simply left alone“.
The too long compacted soil would need to be broken open, the natural drainage contours allowed to reform and the alien weeds & seeds (esp. from hay) allowed to grow and cut before seeding, a’la Peter Andrews’ Back from the Brink.
it would need careful management until the original tree cover would be able to stand on its own roots – where could the workforce be found in this yeoman free rural idyll?
Oh, that’s right, the Soldier Settlements (post WWI & II) were designed to fail in creating such a population – too greart a threat to the squatocracy and their born to rule bunyip aristocracy.
Oh please! It was not forest. There were maybe 5-10 trees per acre. Then we killed and removed the people who made the grasslands and overused them. Then the scrub comes back. There may well be more actual rainforest in Australia than in 1788. There are massive exceptions in some places of course. Read how the soil was and what the country was like. There are and always have been very very few entirely vegetarian cultures on earth.
Nice spray of irrelevancy – who mentioned the Interior being forest or an entirely vegetarian culture?
That reforesting would be a disaster. We do not need to stop grazing animals, we need to change the management. Please read The Biggest Estate on Earth. Australasia was not forested in the last 10 000 plus years. Phase out Kangaroos?
Seaweed supplementation is to animal agriculture as CCS is to Coal fired power…a convenient distraction to delay or prevent the actual changes necessary to tackle the climate crisis
How much grass do you want to eat? There is very little in terms of proportion, of our country’s soils that are good for growing plants. Australia had its own form of agriculture in 1788 and had for millennia. It involved game meat, fruits nuts, breads, seeds, yams. You might also wish to dress entirely in plastic, because if you remove wool and cotton from the equation that is where you might be.
You omitted the main sources of food for the vast majority of the preInvasion populace in the Interior – fish, fowl & eggs.
As is currently is being well demonstrated over a sizeable region of Vic & NSW, not even including the Overflow in the Corner Country.
The very adamance of your ignorance obscures so much reality from you – spraying out half (being generous) understood factoids mashed together without relevance.
Read some anthropology, biology, botany, silviculture (Wehrmacht uniforms were made from wood pulp) and understand how they interact.
Take a real wilderness walk, far from the Madding Crowd and spend a couple of nights under the Wond’rous Glory of the Everlasting Stars.
look up “Fodder King” i bought shares years ago because this company is VERY environmentally focused i’ll send you a newsletter that explains it we’ll