Relationships between methane emissions of dairy cattle and farm management.

Livestock is considered as an important contributor to global methane emissions, predominately due to methanogenesis from ruminants. Moreover, these emissions also represent major losses of energy for dairy cows and therefore are linked to production efficiency. The on-going development of predictive equations (e.g., from milk composition) would allow to relate methane emissions to farm management (e.g., nutrition, environment) on a large scale in the Walloon Region of Belgium. Finally, by acquiring improved knowledge of these relationships, contributions to mitigate methane emissions could be based on an improved management of dairy herds.