Cow Farting Cured!

Having a bit of a 'cow' week here at the Watertrough...a couple of pieces of research to mull over:

• For a few years now, cows have been blamed for belching and farting too much methane into the atmosphere, causing more harmful green-house gases than pollution from cars. So what's to be done about this? One answer could be the addition of garlic into their feed, which could apparently cut their gaseous output by half. However, are we prepared to live in a countryside where garlic breath is de rigueur among cows? And will every piece of beef we eat, and every pint of milk we drink, taste of garlic? And will every item of leather we buy have a garlic hum to it? Not sure if this garlic idea is the answer - but we'll wait and see.
  
• There doesn't seem to be an end to the uses which man has found for cows...(see my book for details - available on Amazon!). But this is a goody: Cow-powered batteries. Fluid is taken from the cow's rumen (the first stomach) via a cannula and put into a fuel cell. This fluid contains the microbes which break down cellulose (plant tissues) in the rumen. So that when cellulose (eg. waste paper and wood) is added to the fluid in the fuel cell it breaks down and electricity is made. It seems to me that if this becomes mainstream, we could have cows being bred purely for their rumen microbes, with breeding programmes to create super-producers. Then it would only be a small step to a robotic dual-milking machine: one arm milking the udder for milk, the other milking the rumen for fluid: sounds like a nightmare scenario (...for the cow!).