PETALUMA, Calif. — The cows had to be deterred from messing with the
experiment.
Researchers from a Bay Area technology company had come to the sprawling
dairy farm north of San Francisco to test an emerging solution to planetwarming emissions: microscopic pink organisms that eat methane, a potent
greenhouse gas.
Kenny Correia, 35, of Correia Family Dairy, watched the team from Windfall Bio
working near the lagoons used to store manure from the farm’s several hundred
cows. The researchers erected a futuristic system of vats, pipes, tubes and shiny
metal supports. Then, when everything was assembled, they poured pink liquid
into one of the vats. “They were looking like mad scientists out there,” Correia
recounted.
He acknowledged initially thinking it was a “crazy idea” to integrate an outdoor
laboratory into a working farm. There was the potential for the cows to “be all
over it — licking it, pulling out wires and scratching on it,” he said.
But livestock farms are a significant source of methane emissions, and Windfall
wanted to see how much the microbes could help.
