Methane Chambers & Banks Setting Climate Change Targets
Extract: Jamie, I've been questioned on this recently quite a bit because there are unfortunately a number of studs that are going down this road, and they're selecting sheep on supposedly low methane. Now, in my mind, this is about as useful as selecting an Olympic athlete team on eye colour. And we're not personally, in our stud, we're not prepared to risk fifty years of genetic games, by actually potentially decreasing genuine traits and gain, those like growth, survival, mil drench fatality, etc. And I think it will be irresponsible to start selecting your sheep and cattle, that's not too far away as well. And just to take a short term political box …
So basically, you're going to decrease in other areas, in order to select for methane. Now what was concerning (and those that are doing it will be jumping up and down right now), but potentially its showing that they have smaller rumens, they are selectively grazing, so likely a very fussy eater, and so they're selecting a high quality diet.
That's a bit like, someone that's had a gastric bypass who needs a very high quality diet in order to eat. So if you put someone like that on a week, just like our sheep do, out the back of the hill all winter, they would not survive. And thats is a really concerning thing. Something may work single trait looking at it in a laboratory but actually out in the field, I certainly do not want an entire mob of fussy eaters.