Photo courtesy of Alvin A.H. Jornada/Special to The Chronicle 2021
By Tara Duggan
California dairy farms will soon be able to feed their cows seaweed to fight climate change after the state Department of Food and Agriculture approved the use of a seaweed feed shown to reduce methane emissions from cow burps, the first in the U.S. to do so.
On Friday, Blue Ocean Barns, which produces the red seaweed at a farm on the Big Island of Hawaii, announced that the supplement had been approved for use on both conventional and organic dairy farms. Called Brominata, the red seaweed variety has been shown to cut methane emissions in dairy cows by 52% over 50 days but so far has been used only in trials.
