Selective breeding can reduce the methane intensity of dairy cows by up to 24% by 2050 through establishing an economic weight on methane production in breeding, according to a new European report.

The report, published by a Dutch team of researchers earlier this month, quantified the effect of including methane production in the Dutch breeding goal using selection index theory.

The current Dutch national index contains 15 traits, related to milk yield, longevity, health, fertility, conformation and feed efficiency.

When including methane production in the current breeding goal with a zero economic value, methane production increases each year, the researchers said.

By putting economic weight on methane production in the breeding goal, however, selective breeding can reduce the methane intensity even by 24% in 2050.

This, the report states, shows that breeding is a “valuable contribution to the whole set of mitigation strategies” that could be applied in order to achieve the goals for 2050 set by the EU.

However, should animal breeding strategies aiming to reduce enteric methane production be implemented – and to achieve the expected breeding impact – there needs to be a sufficient reliability of prediction.

The only way to achieve that is to have enough animals phenotyped and genotyped, the researchers say, noting that the “power calculations offer insights into the difficulties that will be faced in trying to record enough data”.

Recording methane data on 100 farms (with on average 150 cows each) for at least two years is required to achieve the desired reliability of 0.40 for the genomic prediction, the researchers conclude.