Sustainability & efficiency

Challenges and opportunities for including methane into national breeding goals

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Abstract

Within the dairy sector, enteric methane emissions represent a major contributor to the overall carbon footprint of milk. Consequently, strategies to curb methane emissions are essential to improving the environmental sustainability of the dairy industry. While nutritional, management, and technological interventions can reduce emissions, genetic selection offers a cumulative, permanent, and cost-effective solution that complements other mitigation approaches. Integrating methane traits into national breeding goals has the potential to accelerate progress toward climate-smart dairy production. A key challenge in successful implementation of novel traits in breeding goals is identifying traits that capture meaningful biological variation while aligning with existing breeding objectives. Besides methane production (CH₄_P), a few other methane phenotypes have been proposed. Methane production corrected for fat- and protein-corrected milk (CH₄_FPCM) accounts for expected methane production given the genetic merit for fat and protein corrected milk. This trait reflects improvements in both productivity and emission efficiency, given it's reflection of the residual (excess) methane, once the expected emissions associated with production are accounted for, decoupling the trait from milk production. Another important trait is methane production corrected for dry matter intake (CH₄_DMI), which accounts for methane production given the genetic merit for dry matter intake. As feed accounts for a substantial proportion of dairy farm emissions and costs, selection for improved CH₄_DMI may enhance both environmental and economic sustainability. In the Netherlands, methane data on over 12,000 Holstein cows has been collected with sniffers and Greenfeeds over the past five years. Correlations between the methane phenotypes (CH₄_P; CH₄_FPCM; CH₄_DMI) and the national breeding goal of the Netherlands (NVI) were estimated using the MACE method. Understanding these correlations is central to predicting potential trade-offs to the other traits in the national breeding goal if a methane trait gets included in the NVI. Correlations for CH₄_P ranged from -0.21 (fat yield) to 0.14 (saved feed costs). For CH₄ _FPCM the range was from -0.16 (udder health) to 0.32 (saved feed costs), whereas for CH₄ _DMI it was from -0.16 (udder health) to 0.15 (claw health). Correlated response to selection to the NVI traits upon inclusion of the methane traits into the national index were also estimated. Overall, the methane traits varied in their effects on the NVI traits, with most fertility and health traits being unnafected, while production traits had the lowest responses when CH₄_P was included in the NVI, which was expected given the unfavourable genetic correlation between methane and milk production traits. Our results show that inclusion of methane into the Dutch national breeding goal is feasible, which could help farmers lower the carbon footprint of their herds through genetics.

Keywords: 2026

How to Cite:

de Jong, G., Gonzales-Prendes, R., Kempen, L., Orrett, C. & Zetouni, L., (2026) “Challenges and opportunities for including methane into national breeding goals”, World Congress on Genetics Applied to Livestock Production Digital Archive 2026(1): 2286661. doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/wcgalp.24084

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