A conference in Dublin on methane emissions from livestock has heard push back against claims made about the feed additive Bovaer.

The conference, organised by the international climate advocacy group Environmental Defence Fund (EDF), saw a wide ranging conversation, including on livestock feed additives that can reduce methane emissions from cows.

This comes as the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) is completing a scientific opinion on Bovaer, the most widely-known methane-cutting feed additive.

Earlier this year, the EFSA launched a review into the use of 3-nitrooxypropanol (3-NOP), which is sold as Bovaer, in dairy cows and cows for breeding.

The European Commission had asked the EFSA to provide the scientific opinion on the safety of the methane-reducing feed ingredient.

The request followed reports from some farmers in Denmark that their cows' health and milk output had been impacted after using Bovaer.

However, no scientific link between Bovaer and negative impacts on cow health or milk yield is known to exist at present.

Bovaer was mentioned - or alluded to - several times at the conference in the RDS in Dublin today (Thursday, September 24).

The event, which was titled 'On-Farm Solutions: New Opportunities For Business Cases', heard from several speakers from Ireland's agri-sector.

These included Sean McCarthy, on-farm sustainability manager with Kinisla.

McCarthy said: "Well I suppose this is where science and perception kind of meet... There’s plenty of science to support that [Bovaer] is safe to use and is effective in terms of reducing methane.

"So the issue we have, and you’ve seen it a number of times now, is where 'soundbites' in the different platforms and within the public arena are creating almost an uncertainty, or scaring our consumers. So there’s a huge education piece to happen there," McCarthy added.

"It's almost a kind of a psychology piece really in terms of supporting the science. So we do need science, but science ends up in peer-reviewed journals, which the vast majority of people don’t read," McCarthy stated.

Another speaker at the event, Saskia Visser from Climate KIC, the Netherlands-based climate innovation agency, noted that Dutch dairy company FrieslandCampina has been incentivising its suppliers to use Bovaer for around three years, without any complaints from farmers in that time.

Asking a question from the floor, John Harrison from the research division of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine also touched on Bovaer and feed additives generally.

He said that the conversation around feed additives has been "distracted" somewhat by the Bovaer issue, but he also said that it is "the most widely-researched feed additive in the world, and has been shown to be safe".

Harrison asked if there was a responsibility on stakeholders to combat what he said was "misinformation possibly" around the product.