Rice Paddies, Like Cows, Spew Methane. A New Variety Makes Them a Lot Less Gassy
By Matt Simon, Eos/AGU.
Excerpt: ...cows are really gassy, and that’s really bad for the planet: Microbes in their guts produce methane—a greenhouse gas up to 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide—which comes out as burps. Consequently, livestock is responsible for 30 percent of humanity’s methane emissions. ...Rice cultivation, surprisingly enough, accounts for another 12 percent of humanity’s global methane emissions. ...Growing rice requires flooding fields, called paddies, with staggering quantities of water. Microbes known as archaea multiply in the wet, oxygen-poor conditions, releasing methane. One way to reduce those emissions is to inundate the fields less often, but that’s not always feasible given local irrigation infrastructure, and less water can lead to reduced yields. ...Now, though, scientists have gone to the source, announcing a breakthrough in breeding a variety of rice they say reduces methane emissions by 70 percent—while delivering yields nearly twice the global average. “The only drawback is that it cannot be cultivated throughout the whole of China, because the climate is so different in the different regions,” said Anna Schnürer, a microbiologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and coauthor of the paper published in the journal Molecular Plant. “We are still working on finding additional varieties that can handle different temperatures.”...