Denali Brown: Livestock Methane Measurement for Research and Market Development

Abstract

Livestock enteric methane is 3% of US and 5.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and contributes to 14% of global temperature increase today. Most of these emissions are in the global south and from grazing cattle across a billion acres. Developing methane solutions requires accessible measurement for researchers and developers. Auditable markets require accurate farm measurement of emission reductions. Current methods are expensive and highly technical, limiting their scalability and bottlenecking rapid solution development and deployment. Advances in methane measurement for fossil emission provides an opportunity to re-develop them for livestock methane. This talk will discuss the technical and financial requirements for livestock methane measurement, the development of controlled release testbed for livestock methane measurement technology, and the prospects for low cost measurement of livestock methane.

Bio

Dr. Denali “Doc” Brown is the executive director of CowBell Labs, a non-profit project with the mission of making livestock methane measurement more accessible through advocacy, research, and development. Previously, they launched Spark Climate Solutions’ livestock methane program; led data science and field measurement at the biological fertilizer company Pivot Bio; co-founded the agriculture machine vision company Mineral at Google X; and developed the soil carbon measurement and mitigation funding program ROOTS as an ARPA-e Fellow. They share their thoughts at their substack - More CowBell (www.cowbell-climate.substack.com). Doc serves on the Strategic Advisory Board of Indigo Agriculture and as an advisor to Quorum Bio and Spark Climate Solutions. They received their Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Caltech.