Open Country opens butter plant
When American retail giant Cosco came to audit Open Country Dairy’s new butter plant at the Waharoa site and give the green light to supply their American stores, they allowed themselves a week for the exercise.
Researchers from the University of California, Davis, tested a seaweed-based supplement for grazing beef cows on a ranch in Montana. They gave 12 cows the supplement but left another 12 without it; the cows wandered around for 10 weeks, burping as usual, but the ones that ate the supplement produced 37.7% less methane than their buddies — and showed no differences afterward in terms of health or weight.
That’s an enormous improvement, especially of a greenhouse gas that is substantially more powerful a warming agent than carbon dioxide, though on a shorter time scale.
