By Charles C. Elrod, NEAFA Board of Directors
At this week’s Cornell Nutrition Conference, a major theme was agriculture’s role in mitigating its contributions to climate change. Cornell is at the forefront of many large multi-institution and public-private initiatives to study mitigation strategies and to provide decision tools to help ag producers reduce their carbon footprint. Drs. Kristan Reed and Joe McFadden, the NEAFA Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellows, reported on two of the projects which they are leading.
As we have heard from Dr. Reed along the way, she is spearheading the development of The Ruminant Farm Systems Model, a.k.a. the RuFaS Model. Instead of jumping into coding the model, the interdisciplinary group developed a deliberate, methodological approach to model development. They have assembled a stakeholder advisory group which will help to guide the model and ensure that it is relevant for their needs. They have also set out a number of guiding principles, such as adaptability for changing technologies, interoperability so that, in time, it can interface with other software or models and transparency and documentation so that other scientists can continue to keep the model updated and relevant for changing needs.
RuFaS has four primary modules which represent the major nutrient cycle components of a dairy farm: animal, manure handling, crop + soil and feed storage. Using whole farm management elements, such as herd characteristics, manure handling system and cropping practices, the model is populated with macro-level data. Then, each module is populated with more specific and detailed data. When the scenarios are run, the outputs include costs of production, resource use, greenhouse gas emissions and air and water quality. Dietary, cropping or management mitigation scenarios can also be run to determine their impact on any of these outputs. These scenarios can be scaled and aggregated at the farm, local, regional or national levels to inform decision making, policy decisions and identifying research opportunities. The team is looking forward to publishing version 1 and launching a pilot testing program in 2022.
Dr. McFadden also had a “big reveal” at the conference this week in the form of an announcement that Cornell will soon be the home to four climate-controlled respiration chambers to study gas exchange and metabolism in livestock. McFadden has worked to identify funding from Cargill, Inc., The Genesee Valley Regional Market Authority, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the Department of Animal Science to acquire four metabolism chambers and renovate the Large Animal Research and Teaching Unit (LARTU) adjacent to Morrison Hall to accommodate them. This state-of-the-art equipment, which will be unique in the nation, is the gold-standard approach to study enteric greenhouse gas emissions from domestic animals. The equipment allows the fine-tune control of temperature, humidity, and lighting, and measures feed and water intake in real-time. Additionally, the chamber system enables the measurement of oxygen consumption, which is required to better understand heat production by the animal and better define nutrient utilization and requirements for meat and milk production. McFadden is working with other Cornell researchers to develop a cross-disciplinary effort to better predict and mitigate enteric and manure greenhouse gas emissions from dairy cattle and other domestic animals. It is anticipated that the renovations and equipment installation will be completed by fall 2022. Thereafter, Cornell research will in part focus on the study of feed additives that inhibit ruminal methanogenesis, better define the effects of heat stress on milk production efficiency, and improve the predictive-capacity of the Cornell Net Carbohydrate and Protein System to model for energy and protein-allowable milk in dairy cattle. The equipment acquisition and facility renovations will best position the Cornell Department of Animal Science faculty and students to lead in the discovery of approaches that reduce greenhouse gas emission by domestic animal production.