Methane Sensor Validation

Monitoring and Measuring Methane Emissions

Climate-controlled respiration chambers are the gold-standard approach to measure greenhouse gas emissions from animals because they measure all emissions per day. However, their accessibility and throughput are limited, and cost of use and labor requirement is high. The dairy industry is currently developing or using lower-cost alternative methane sensor technologies to monitor emissions at the farm level. Some of the technology includes:

• Headbox units, such as GreenFeed
• Infrared sensors installed in automatic milking systems
• Lasers
• Wearables
• Rumen boluses

Since these tools do not measure all emissions from an animal in a given day, they are expected to have poor agreement with the use of respiration chambers. We are working to develop and utilize correction factors to adjust for this lack of agreement and have developed a two-step validation protocol.

1. Use a series of controlled release rates of methane (or carbon dioxide) to establish linearity between release and recovery for respiration chambers versus the alternative sensor.
2. Evaluate enteric methane (or carbon dioxide) emissions of cattle using respiration chambers or the alternative sensor under controlled environmental conditions with necessary replication.

Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences is collaborating with the Cornell College of Engineering as we work with industry partners on the design and functionality of their methane sensor equipment. Our effort in this space will enhance the development of accurate methane sensors that can assess baseline enteric methane emissions inventories on farms and assess changes in methane emissions in response to specific interventions, such as feed additives.