With investigations using tubes directly tied into cows' gas-collecting
stomachs, a team of Argentine scientists is launching a project to track and
reduce amount of contaminated gas produced by its famous cows.

CASTELAR, ARGENTINA (RECENT) REUTERS - 
 A lone cow like many others in Argentina goes out for a graze on the
luscious and sprawling Argentine Pampas meadows, but only this time it does so
with a tube tied directly to the one of its four stomachs that leads to a red
tank attached on its back.
    The apparatus, the first of its kind, is being attached by scientists
of the Argentina National Institute of Agrarian Technology (INTA) to track,
study, and therefore reduce the contaminant digestive gas content being
emitted by the South American nation's roughly 55 million cows.
    "I would say that we were really surprised by the results, because
we never imagined that a bovine like this one that weighs some 550 kgs
produces 800 to 1,000 liters per day of digestive, not just those coming from
methane, emissions, and that some 25 to 30 percent of those emissions are
methane-based. Those were both real surprises from the point of view of the
composition of the emissions, because as we said, we had never taken
measurements before," said Dr. Guillermo Berra, who is one of several
INTA scientists studying cows at an experimental farm for tracking contaminant
digestive emissions in Castelar, a small city located 100 km west of Buenos
Aires city.
  Being one of the 182 ratifiers of the Kyoto Protocol, Argentina is taking
part in the global efforts to reduce the emissions of contaminant greenhouse
gases, even though it produces just 0.6 percent of the world's total of
greenhouse gases. That rate does not mandate the country - as it does others -
to follow through on the quantitative reduction rates laid out in the
protocol. 
    According to official Argentine state statistics, 47 percent of what
the country does produce in greenhouse gas emissions comes from fossil fuel
consumption from the burning of sources like automobiles. Another four percent
comes from Argentine industrial output. And a sizable 44 percent comes from
the country's large agricultural sector, a large portion of which comes
directly from the grazing cows.
   "Thirty percent of national emissions comes from emissions
generated by cows," Dr. Barra said.
    Naturally directing its energies in the reduction of contaminant gases
towards its cows, the INTA researchers are seeking to use the information to
manipulate the diet and lifestyles of the cows so as to reduce the amount of
contaminating gases they produce.  
    "We are starting with the preliminary study we've completed, and
we've found that through the utilization of tannins in particular, which is
what we are working with at this moment, even though there are other additives
and forms to manipulate a diet, the emission of methane can be diminished by
25 percent," said Dr. Silvia Valtorta, a researcher from the National
Council for Scientific Investigations (CONICET) working at the INTA farm, who
is having the gas content collected as well through tubes attached to the
stomachs, but is having them led to unattached yellow balloons. Instead, for
her work, the balloons are being hung up in a small corral in which several of
the cows are being kept.    
    Valtorta and the rest of her team's work is a small but perhaps
monumental step in the reduction of a material, one among several emitted by
cows, that makes up a sizable 20 percent of the world's greenhouse gas
content.