SUSTAINABILITY 78 FEED & ADDITIVE MAGAZINE April 2025 ple,” explained Arango, a lead author on an IPCC report on mitigating climate change. “And if you multiply the potential for GHG mitigation across millions of hectares of degraded pastureland, we can make major contributions to carbon storage in soils, and significantly reduce the planet-heating effects of methane and nitrous oxide.” The Alliance’s latest greenhouse gas mitigation (GHG) research, which has implications for increased livestock sustainability beyond the tropics, is still incipient. Yet it builds on decades of conservation and research by the Alliance and other CGIAR centers. Scientists are confident their work will lead to more cost-effective, sustainable feed options for grazing livestock and intensive systems. SEEKING METHANE MITIGATORS A few hundred meters from the methane lab is the Future Seeds, which houses 22,657 accessions of tropical forages collected from 75 countries. The accessions are viable collections of seeds from 690 species of grasses, legumes, shrubs and trees eaten by livestock. The methane lab’s experimental forages come from the repository, which CGIAR scientists collected during the 1970s and 1980s, a time of rampant ecosystem destruction from urbanization and loss of traditional crops and forages for industrial replacements. (The collections were housed in a converted slaughterhouse until Future Seeds opened in 2022.) “Their mission was to conserve as much as possible before it disappeared,” said Juan José Gonzalez, who manages the Alliance’s forages collection. Future Seeds, part of CGIAR’s global network of gene banks, also contains the world’s largest collections of common beans and cassava accessions; almost 38,000 and 6,000, respectively. Future Seeds, opened in 2022 at the Colombia campus of the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, is a state-of-the-art gene bank that safeguards accessions of some 22,600 tropical forage accessions, almost 38,000 of common bean, and 6,000 of cassava. The forages used for methane-emission reduction trials in livestock at the Alliance come from the repository. Gene bank scientists screen them for their potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions before the grasses are sent to laboratory trials with livestock. Credit: Juan Pablo Marín for the Alliance.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTUxNjkxNQ==