Methane-reducing compounds for New Zealand farmers to use are a step closer with Australian company Rumin8 registering its feed additives provisionally with the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines board.
Rumin8 is a feed additive based on an organic active compound, tribromomethane, claimed to be the most effective of all actives tested for methane reduction in livestock.
The company has developed a means of synthesising the compound usually harvested and extracted from plants, turning it into a scalable lower cost process.
With registration Rumin8 is now able to conduct efficacy and safety studies on commercial farm operations to generate data to back final approval for use here.
CEO David Messina said provisional registration is an important first step in the NZ registration pathway.
“NZ had always been a key market and the company had been working with commercial and research partners in NZ to test product safety and efficacy since late 2022,” he said.
These had included two trials, one beef and one dairy, with the beef trial using a methane measuring facility that monitors levels continuously while the dairy trial uses Greenfeed systems measuring methane emissions by taking short burst measurements through the day.
Working with DairyNZ in Waikato, that trial measures output of methane from lactating dairy cows being offered the supplement three times a day over 45 days to investigate the methane reducing potential under a pasture-based system.
The beef trial is being conducted with AgResearch in Palmerston North. Other trials are also underway in Brazil and Australia.
The company is backed by the Bill Gates-founded Breakthrough Energy, using pharmaceutical tech to create affordable feed and water supplements capable of reducing methane emissions from livestock.
The company has already claimed a 80% reduction in methane output with its product when dosing livestock through water troughs.
Messina said the company prefers to use the methane yield measurement for marking the product’s effectiveness.
This quantifies the total amount of methane produced divided by the amount of feed consumed, or dry matter intake, to give a more accurate indicator of the compound’s impact while accounting for any possible reduction in feed consumption, an undesirable outcome.
