Farmers are looking to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in a weird and wonderful way: using genetically engineered, low-methane sheep.
A project named ‘Breed for CH4nge’ has been announced in the U.K., pledging £2.9 million—$3.7 million—to breed sheep to emit as little methane as possible, helping farming get closer to net zero emissions.
Methane is a greenhouse gas, which is around 80 times more powerful as a heat-trapping insulator in our atmosphere than CO2 over a 20-year period.
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This project is led by genetics company Innovis and funded by the U.K. government’s Farming Innovation Fund, and is a three-year initiative that plans to measure the methane emissions of 13,500 sheep in 45 flocks, to determine the efficiency of the sheep as of now.
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They then plan to analyze this data, as well as data on the size of the sheep’s rumen [part of the stomach] and microbiota [microscopic organisms in the gut], to rank the sheep in terms of methane emissions, feeding efficiency, and health. DNA sampling will also allow researchers to study the relationships of these traits with the sheep genome.
The highest scorers on this Estimated Breeding Value (EBV) scale will be selectively bred over multiple generations to create sheep that are still healthy and useful to farmers, but produce less methane than before.
