When people think of Vermont, a lot of the time they think dairy cows.

But what you might not know is that cows contribute to climate change when they burp and poop.

Agriculture in general is responsible for about 15% of the global greenhouse gas impacts.

A major culprit, methane, which is a super potent climate warming greenhouse gas.

In the short term, methane has 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide.

That's because of how it traps radiation.

It's better at holding heat in the atmosphere.

And one major source of it is when cow manure breaks down.

It might not sound like much, but it adds up.

Monument Farms in Weybridge, Vermont, is a small dairy farm that's trying to do something about it.

At this facility, we have around 540 cows right now.

A cow can eat 60 pounds of feed a day and drink 40 to 60 gallons of water a day.

That turns into 33 gallons of waste per milking cow per day.

Multiply that by 540 cows and the animals on this farm are producing more than 15,000 gallons of manure every day.

Basically what's in it is particles of the feed that never broke down in the cows stomach.

Traditionally, farmers let that manure break down in an open air lagoon before spreading it on their fields as fertilizer.

But in the process, methane is released into the atmosphere as a biproduct.

If that process is enclosed, that methane is captured.

And that's being done on some farms like monument by something called a bio digester.

The manure gets pushed and there's a grated floor at the end that will drop down into a trench.

That's the flow gutter.

So everything flows down to the very end to the pump station that will feed the digester.

It's in there 21 days.

The digester is basically the same thing as a cow stomach.

It's a living thing in there.

Just like in the manure pit, bacteria eat the undigested particles of food.

All that eating makes a methane rich gas called bio gas that gets trapped at the top of the digester.

As for what's left over... As more comes in, it just keeps getting pushed across, comes out the other end.

It then gets pumped up to the separator where we squeeze it with an auger through heavy screens, liquid will go out to the manure pit for us to then spread on the field for fertilizer, the solid matter we utilize for the bedding under the cows.

In addition, methane is essentially natural gas, and so it can be used as a fuel.

At Monument Farms, the gas gets pumped into an engine, where its burned to make electricity, which gets sent into the grid and monument farms gets a credit on their electric bill.

The generator here can put out around $15,000 a month of credit and that's roughly what our bill is for our whole entire business.

Now, to be clear, burning methane still creates greenhouse gas emissions.

It turns the methane into carbon dioxide and water.

But CO2 is a much less powerful greenhouse gas in the near term.

So if done well, this is a better alternative to directly releasing methane into the atmosphere.

Given the potential that we currently have for reducing methane from oil and gas and from livestock, we could avoid a quarter of a degree Celsius of warming by mid-century, which is very significant.