Carbon: a nonmetallic chemical element with atomic number 6 that readily forms compounds with many other elements and is a constituent of organic compounds in all known living tissues.
Most words offer a positive or negative connotation as their first impression. What do you think of first after hearing the word “carbon”? How might the answer be different if the question was posed 20 years ago or 10 years ago compared to today?
Some might think back to memories of high school chemistry that might not be so fond. Others might think of climate change. Still others might be thinking more about economics than science and think first of carbon credits. We hear about monetizing carbon frequently today, but how often are the details behind the term mostly ignored?
The building blocks
If your first reaction when thinking about the periodic table relates to Mr. White’s chemistry class in “Breaking Bad,” let’s go back to school for just a bit. Carbon matters to everyone, and understanding it a little better will probably help the dairy producer of today navigate the complicated waters of the future.
In school there were two types of chemistry classes. If you like plants and animals, you would’ve probably enjoyed organic chemistry a little more — or perhaps, hated it a little less! If you were the little kid with different types of rocks in your pocket and intrigued with metals and building things, inorganic chemistry might have been the choice for you. There aren’t really hard lines between these two, but when thinking about organic chemistry and things that are or were once alive, carbon is the star of that movie.
Why does all of this matter to the average dairy producer or dairy industry professional? The answer is simple: Carbon is the thing we are constantly managing in most of what we do every day. My job as a nutritionist is driven by the attempt to guide the process of growing and buying carbons found in forage and feed and using the cow to convert them to carbon in butterfat, milk protein, and lactose. Dairy producers have been trading carbon long before anyone ever thought of a carbon credit.
When thinking of the periodic table, we should think about building blocks. These are the small pieces that our world is made of. Your house is made of things like concrete, wood, metal, and sheetrock. And just like the building blocks of plants and animals, at a basic level, these are matter detailed in the little blocks of the periodic table. Among all of these, carbon is likely the most important. A similar understanding of nitrogen is helpful, but just like gas makes your car go down the road, carbon is at the center of the movement of all living things. The technology with which we can guide this process will determine things like feed efficiency and carbon loss.
We have many tools
I remember a nutrition class at Auburn University where we were taught the volatile fatty acids that were created in the rumen from the carbohydrates in feed. The basic understanding of these was quickly followed by a description of how monensin works to improve feed efficiency. I never dreamed that the basic understanding of that would help guide me through carbon loss mitigation in the dairy cow and how a better understanding of that helps my clients.
The dirty word in this story is methane. The rumen of a cow creates some amount of methane; this is unavoidable. The process that creates this methane is the same process that helps create the butterfat in the milk. Acetic acid is at the center of this topic, and managing it in the rumen is how we make the process as efficient as possible. Reductions in methane loss are achievable. Monensin has been doing this in the cattle industry for decades, but we have more tools now, so let’s use them. Think of methane as a lost carbon that you paid for in a ton of soybean hulls or the cost, labor, time, and effort put into growing a corn silage crop. It is a carbon that you bought but never sold. Reducing or mitigating this loss is the game today. Don’t be caught watching this topic go past you. Forget the noise and the politics and think about science and economics.
We can improve feed efficiency in many ways which reduce carbon loss in the cow herd. Looking deeper into rumen fermentation, though, is where we can make a more holistic gain that isn’t just because we made more milk from less feed. These two approaches are additive. So, as we keep becoming better at every part of dairy production, we will make more milk with less feed as an industry.
Concurrently, we have tools to make nuanced changes in rumen fermentation that can add to that broader production efficiency gain. An example of this would be keeping your freestalls or dry lots comfortable so cows can lie down more. Excessive standing has an energy cost and hurts feed efficiency. Maybe an even better example would be getting cows pregnant on schedule to reduce the number of days in late lactation where feed efficiency is at the lowest point. At the same time, we can use various tools for carbon loss mitigation in the ration to make these gains even better.
This isn’t new to us. I learned how monensin works in 1985. Now we have more tools and strategies. As an industry, we must embrace these and advocate for the cow that can actually be a tool to manage the overall carbon situation by turning low quality roughage and protein into valuable human food. Feeding the world is a sacred task. Let’s do it as efficiently as we can. This way, everyone wins.
