Welcome to the Resolve to Solve with Miles O'Brien podcast, where we g behind the scenes of the Arizona PBS documentary series Resolve to Solve with Miles O'Brien.

We'll discuss the challenges the discoveries, and the things you might not get from watching the television series alone.

I'm your host, Elise Hu, and joining me on thi podcast is the veteran science journalist himself, Miles O'Brien.

On this episode we look at a surprising solution to cattle methane production that is cow burps.

And that solution is seaweed in cow feed.

Miles.

Welcome in.

Thanks for joining me.

Good to be with you, Elise.

A wild stat that I really want to underline so we can understand the scal of the cattle methane problem is that livestock are responsible for more atmospheric warming potential than the entire all and gas industry combined.

Is that right?

Well, if you're talking about methane specifically, that is right.

The emissions from the fossi fuel industry are significant.

Go to the Permian Basin and see how much methane leaks out of those and gas wells there.

That is a lot of methane leakage.

But livestock writ large across the planet, 1.5 billion head of cattl actually are on par with that.

Or maybe a little more.

When you tal about climate change solutions, you have to look at this one because it is a problem that can be managed and the solution can be dealt with a little mor strategically, maybe more easily than talking about carbon dioxide, which is everywhere in in everything.

Yeah.

That's what I was going to ask you, because typically we think of CO2 as the culprit for climate change.

Why is methane such a problem?

Well, it's 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas over its lifetime.

So 80 times is a big number.

It's not as long lived as carbon dioxide, which stays in the atmosphere for a century or more, but it is very potent.

So this is another reason why it's a good one to tackle when you're thinking about solutions, because it's short lived.

If we as a society get a hold of these methane emissions, whether it's from the oil and gas industry or from livestock, we can really move the needle on climate change in relatively short order.

Tackling carbon dioxide, that's a multi-generational problem.

So far, we haven't shown much success doing tha as you could readily agree to.

And so we are faced with you know, how do you handle CO2?

Big question.

Big problems.

It's everywhere.

Methane.

It's more specific.

We know where it's leaking.

We know how to go at it.

And it's in specific sectors in this case livestock or and gas industry.

And let's take a look and a listen of the clip.

That really sets up the urgency of this problem.

Scientists say we must cut global greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 to limit global warming to 2.7°F, but we're headed in the opposite direction.

Emissions are still rising.

As it turns out, a big solution might be bite sized.

Seaweed in cow feed.

It's an unexpected way to solve a big problem, but it's not so much an invention as it is an understanding of chemistry that nature figured out long ago.

Solutions don't always begin with an original thought in a human mind.

Often the biggest breakthroughs are discoveries based on keen observations, the result of paying attention to what nature already knows.

All right, something really touching.

Miles in this episode was your relationship with Joan Solon, which it sounds like goes back many decades.

Tell us, who is Joan?

Well, it begins with our kids, as a lot of relationships among adults do.

Our kids showed up in the same kindergarten many years ago now, and we immediately hit it off.

She and her husband, Kevin, and my wife at that time, and our two kids, we had boy and a girl about the same ages, all that stuff, and we got to know them very well.

Joan is a very humble person, Midwestern roots all that Iowa, all that stuff.

And I didn't fully appreciate what a hard charger she was until I got to know her a little bit more.

And she was working at the time for Andersen Consultin and was an early partner there, one of the highest ranking female partners in the firm.

And when I started talking to her about the way she viewed the world she is a natural problem solver.

And because, you know, after all, that's what a good consultant does.

They tackle a problem, come up with solutions.

You know, we've stayed in touch.

We've, you know, very close became neighbors and vacation homes.

On it goes.

And then, you know, we kind of went as the kids grew up, we kind of went in separate directions.

And then I heard about her endeavor with this company, Blue Ocean.

Barnes and I had been tracking it and had been kind of waiting for the opportunity to tell the story and resolve to solve came along, and I almost immediately thought of her and her potential solution for this problem.

And as you mentioned she was at Andersen Consulting, which we might not be familiar with today, bu we are familiar with Accenture, which is what it became.

And so Joan didn't come to science or scientific problem solving kind of in a traditional way.

What inspired her to wind up with this particular solution to the methane problem?

It's a bit security, and we didn't have a ton of tim to tell the story in the piece.

This is the advantage of the podcast, right?

So she she had a huge pay day when Andersen Consulting went public and became Accenture.

It was like, you know, an eight figure payday.

So she was 42 and set for life.

And, you know, a lot of peopl would go play golf or whatever.

But she decide she had always wanted to teach English to middl and high school, mostly girls.

And so she actually started teaching at a girls school in Atlanta, ultimately becam the headmaster of this school.

And so she was, you know, this was her second career and she was loving it.

She went and at this school, they required each student before they could graduate to researc and give a talk about a problem that was near and dear to them and what might be done about it, and the talk that she listened to in the auditorium that really captured he imagination, was a young woman who introduced her to an idea and a problem.

Joan had never heard of, which was livestock emitting methane.

And so this basically this, you know, 12th grader gave this fascinating talk about methane emissions and livestock production.

And Joan having grown up around a farm, her grandfather was a farmer in Iowa, and she spent a lot of time on that farm growing up.

It just connected for with her right away, she said, surely there's got to be a way to address this.

She went into her, you know, hyper Joan Selwyn problem solving mode.

And so what happened?

Interestingly, coincidentally, she left the school to took to take a sabbatical at Stanford University.

So she had a year off to do whatever she wanted.

And she couldn't get thi methane thing out of her brain.

And so she spent the whole time during her sabbatical teaching herself about climate change, about methane impact on climate and livestock, and what is happening inside a cow's stomach to create all this methane.

And she she's going through, you know, peer reviewed journals and deep, intricate and detailed papers with no background whatsoever in science, which I can kind of relate to because I'm a I'm a history major and I cover science, so I get it.

It's not easy.

But she basically plowed through it, and she stumbled onto a paper that came out of Australia, which showed a tremendous response among cattle who are fed a particular kind o seaweed called asparagus taxa.

Foremost, it's a red seaweed which they had fed some cattle in Australia, and they saw dramatic reductions in the amount of methane that came out of their burps, like 80, 90 plus percent.

And she she was like, I have found the solution.

So she, you know, here she was at Stanford.

She said, well, where's the nearest place I can go to find an expert?

Well, it turns out some of these papers.

One of the author was Amaya Cabrera, who was the.

He is a fascinating individual native of Eritrea who is at rise to the top of academia in the US and has made this subject methane production on a livestock his focus.

So she waltzes into his office kind of unannounced and said, you know, have you seen this paper?

And isn't this a solution?

And he said, and he was like, who are you?

And she said, well, I' just this person who, you know, sounds sabbatical.

And I've been thinking about this.

And he and he was a little dismissive of her and, and said, we know this might be true Joan, but I don't have the time or funding to research it right now.

So sorry.

Thank you.

So she being Joan, what do you think she did?

She went out and raised a million bucks to do a pilot study.

Just went to a couple, you know, family office foundations kind of thing.

And and so she triggered an initial study, and Amaya was like, oh, well, if you got some, you know, funding and a study, I'll help you with it.

And matter of fact, he did the study and that was led them to a dairy farm in Marin County, of all places, and a particular dairy farmer who has strong feelings about the environment and concern about what his herd does to the environment.

He tried it out in his herd and had tremendous results.

And so things snowballed from there.

I really love the episode because of these characters.

You know, each individual person you met who then led to anothe great and inspiring character.

I want to zoom out though and ask you.

This series focuses on the mos urgent challenges of our time, but when you were narrowing down the topics for the series, which came first, the problem or the solution?

Well there's one other element here.

Yeah, the person right, you hit on, you hit at a key point.

You know this as well as I do because we do the same thing for a living.

Good stories are about people, right?

You know, I think just to give yo a little backstory on this, when Arizona PBS approached me and said, you know, we've got some money to do a science series, what would you like to do?

I've had this kind of borough, my saddle for years.

I've done 11 Novas, and every time I ge to the end of the line on Anova, I try to inject a little bit about the scientis and what motivates the scientist and why they're doing what they're doing.

And Nova, they have a formula.

They don't care too much about that.

So so it never ends up in the final cut.

And it kind of frustrates me because I don't think people really understand who the who scientists are, who problem solvers are and what motivates them.

And so it was very importan to me that at the center of it, there was a person who was just driven to get this solution.

And then of course, it had to be a problem which was relevant to people that people care about.

And then the third element, which you know is important, is that it can't be a pie in the sky kind of solution we need to think about.

You know, it's not like once we colonize Mars, we'll solve this, you know, not that kind of stuff.

I wanted stuff that was on the shelf or near to being on the shelf.

And because, you know, that's what happens when you when you do what I do for a living, when you go around all these labs and talk to scientists, they're like, you know, it's just a shame that we don't deploy XYZ.

It's we can do this.

We've solve all the technological hurdles.

It's just a matter of scaling it up and having society make a bet on it.

And and so when you hear that all the time, you realize we have more solutions than we think, we have more problem solvers than we think.

And we can address some big problems that a lot of us might say it's too big in many cases.

What people do, which really upsets me, is they defaul into kind of a mode of apathy.

We are talking about this particular solution, which is really impressive, but I'm curious, what were solutions to this cattle methane problem before that were explored prior to this seaweed in the cow feed solution?

Not much that I know of.

This is a problem really.

At least the methane issue as a subset of the, you know, climate change problem as a greenhouse gas, it has emerged as a significant problem in more recent years, it's become a greater focus.

You look at the latest, the last cops the big meetings of scientists.

Methane has risen to a higher level of priority just in recent years.

And so this particular issue was kind of a kind of a sleeper issue.

And now that it's come to the to the fore, and it was enough of an issue that a high schooler in Atlanta made it a focus of her presentation before she could graduate.

That made it click in Jones brain, which made it, you know, possible for a mayas to do the study, which has enabled a whole company to take shape.

And as you say, I love the whole linkages there and how that all came to be.

I'm glad you brought u what Blue Ocean Barnes is doing.

Let's take another look at a clip that gives us an overview of the work going on at Blue Ocean.

Blue Ocean Barnes.

Marine biologist Hannah gave me a tour.

It begins indoors in a carefully controlled environment.

So this is called the sun two.

Although they look like giant lava lamps to me, all of our culture start in this room and then scale outside all the way up through our different vessel sizes.

Outdoors, they scale up in 17,000 gallon vessels.

Once thriving, the seaweed is harvested in cycles, leaving enough to keep the thing going.

Yeah.

Think of like a sourdough starter.

So in that we will harvest what we need.

We leave behind enough to keep growing and get to repeat that indefinitely.

You're trying to scale up and still understand some basic science at the sam time, which is challenge, right?

Oh, 100%, yeah.

We're applying our learnings as we're still asking the next question.

So not only are we doing the research, but we're applying it every single day and we're seeing the results of it already.

Miles, this podcast is all about kind of getting a peek behind the story, going behind the scenes.

So what were some challenges or surprises that you and the team faced along the way in telling the story?

Well, it's a bit far flung.

We had to go to in Mexico and that was somebody had to do it right.

And that that wa I can't call that a challenge.

Are you kidding?

Everything I do is every, every day I have in the field is a fun day.

I haven't worked for a living ever.

So, no, you know, I think the the consistent challenge when you talk about solutions, journalism at least is that you run into newsrooms that are extremely skeptical of any solution.

Right?

Journalists are trained to find problems and scream about the problem, but we really are reluctant to get into the world of solutions.

Editors will tell you.

Well, that sounds lik public relations or something.

You're not doing journalism.

And it really bothers me because I think if you apply journalistic principles to potential solutions, there's some magic there that isn't done so much in the world of journalism.

And so when you whe you come across something like really seawee and it says, you know, is this something that is on the up an up, right, or am I falling for, you know, a press release?

And so really, the challenge in all the stories I've done is doing the due diligence.

And really before we get ou the door, as much as I love Joan and I do, she's a good friend.

I wanted to make sure what she was doing stood on firm, scientific and you know, practicality grounds.

And so I spent a lot of time talking to a lot of peopl in this space, calling Australia where they're ahead of us on this, and that's in the film as well, talking to getting people who are in the methane space to weigh in on this.

And once you get that kind of like, yeah, you know, there's there's probably something to this.

And in each case people say, well, it's about scaling up, right?

And I always say, well, okay, that is true.

With 1.5 billion head of cattle, we have to scale up.

But relative to the problem is it that much of a scale up?

I mean, when you talk about trying to tackle CO2, you talk about scaling up.

I mean, it's everywhere, right?

If you're talking about a specific sector like this and you're feeding them, you know, a fraction of the feed is made of this seaweed, you can really move the needle pretty quickly.

And yes, you do have to scale up.

But relativ to other big problems and scale ups in other realms, this might be one to look at.

Practically speaking, what needs to scale up.

It's the amount of domesticate seaweed that has to be produced that would need to happen at scale, and then putting it in pill form, or a way to actually get it into the cows.

Yeah.

That's okay.

That's the nail on the head right there.

You know seaweed.

You know this has never been grown on, you know, these giant lava lamps and in these pools and all these things.

So what blue ocean barns is, you know, the science is proven, right.

Herme has come up with enough science.

And the and the other people in this realm have will tell you that even at fraction trace amounts this it works okay.

And Roma form is not taken on into either the meat or milk of the cow.

It just stays in the stomach and does it's, you know, it's alchemy there.

So there's not there's no consequence to us eating or drinking the milk, eating the meat.

So that's fine.

We've got that box checked and it doesn't.

It takes only a tiny fraction.

So really it just comes out to how do you how do you make it at scale?

And there are big multinational companies.

Nestlé is one of them.

Huge, you know, cattle and dairy productions, of course, that have made commitments to net zero.

Most, you know, let's face it, it's not so much of that in the United States.

But this is European company and they're having a terribl time meeting their their goals.

And this is something that that actually gets them there in a significant way.

And so when big multinationals like that get involved, you could imagine blue ocean barns being gobbled up, so to speak, and, you know, some real capital put in there to scale up these operations.

Right now they're working out the kinks.

As Joan told me, this seaweeds a bit finicky, taking it out of the ocean and putting it in pools to to make it work.

They're learning about that, but nobody's tried it before.

I think that's the story right now.

It would will there be som big players that are willing to make this investment and start feeding large herds of cattle with this seaweed infused cattle feed, and that could really change the numbers on climate pretty quickly.

As we're talking about the numbers, we should acknowledge there's always a gap between when you finish filmin and you are back from the field.

And when this final episode was produced in came out.

So I'm wondering whether there were any development along the way just in this gap when post-production was happening, that you want to updat the listeners and viewers with?

Well, it's steady as she goes.

She signed contracts.

Joan has decided to no longer be the daily CEO.

She's she's now on the board and enjoying a little more free time.

I think it was taking up more time than she expected, but she, you know, Joan was on a mission, so she had to follow through.

So yeah, they're plowing through.

But, you know, the honest to goodness truth is they're getting nowhere in the United States.

So the Food and Drug Administration, you know, would b the governing body in this case.

And there's two ways to go in this.

It can be considered a supplement to the feed, which is a much lowe standard for regulatory issues.

Or it can be viewed as a veterinary drug, much higher standard.

At this point.

There's not a priority in this particular administration to do anything as it relates to climate change.

And so right now it's stuck.

But in Europe it's different in Australia.

There I ate a methane, nearly methane free burger.

Yes, it made me hungry and it made me curious to in Australia then did the regulators there consider it just a supplement to the feed then rather than a veterinary drug?

Yes.

Okay.

Exactly.

Okay, exactly.

And you know, I think the regulatory system may not be as dysfunctional as ours.

Right.

And put it that way.

And so yes, they, they've, they've approved it and it's a thing they're now.

So again that that company there is now trying to figure out how to scale this up They want to feed it to sheep.

So we can you can have a wool sweater that was methane free that kind of thing.

It's not just cows.

Any any so-called ruminant will create this.

Methane is kind of this weird chemical process as they digest the, you know, the grass they eat and turn it into stuff we like to eat or where is ther anything that didn't make it to the final cut that you would have liked to have included, had had you had a director's cut version of resolve to solve?

I don't don't we all don't we all I there was that whole section I really wanted to tell the story of the the young woman who gave the talk.

And frankly, I wanted to find her because, you know, I thought that would be really interesting.

You know what?

And if she's listening gosh, give me reach out to me.

Right?

Because Joan couldn't remember her name, it would have required a little bit of sho leather reporting to find her.

I'm sure I could have, but we ran out of time.

When we say or do things in life, we don't know what the rippl effect of what that is, right?

And that young woman I don't even know if she knows that that speech he gave it was a catalyst.

Yeah.

True catalyst.

It's tha that's to me that the magic of the Resolve to solve series.

It's kind of these unintended consequences of bright ideas that get turned into kind of a relay.

And the relay, when we get to the end of the finish line, could be, you know, something where we're all, you know, we can all collectively be happy about it.

And they turn into food like low methane burgers.

So I have to know, could you taste a difference?

Do they just taste like any other?

No.

Yummy burger.

It was just a good burger.

It was just a good burger.

No.

And I, you know, I had a taste of Albert Strauss's ice cream as well.

He's the dairy in Marin County, and he gave me some ice cream that came from cows that were eating the bromo form, which is the seaweed, active and grieving the seaweed infused feed.

You can't taste a thing.

It's perfectly fine and guilt free, right?

We want to end the episodes in the podcast with action.

So are there any practical action items for our viewers and listeners who might want to support this work?

You know, I think it' it might be worth reaching out to your member of Congress and and saying, you know, I've heard about this and I've heard that the Food and Drug Administration feels constrained by its own regulations, unable to, you know, approve this.

It's approved in Australia.

It's if it isn't approved i Europe, it might well soon be.

This should be something w demand of our political leaders.

And I'm telling you, just moving the needle in Congress, which I know is you talk about things that defy solutions.

But moving the needle in Congress in order to push the FDA in this direction would do tremendous things much.

And you know what?

You know, when when people say, what should I do about climate change?

You know, should I stop eating meat?

That's almost always the first thing they say.

And I say, no, no you shouldn't stop eating meat.

You know, there might be some other reasons why you want to stop eating meat for your health.

But don't think of this as a climate solution.

Because really, what we need to do is system wide, countrywide big changes and a little bit of seaweed in the cow feed, if it were allowed, would do just that.

So I always say to people, now the thing you need to do is vote.

With this in mind, think about elected officials who are going to make this a priority someone who can move the needle on our regulatory system to say, hey, wait a minute, if it's good enough in Australia, here's the science, here's the data.

There's no indications of any harmful effects.

Why aren't we doing this right?

It sounds like this is just a classification problem that can be solved by reclassifying seaweed in the cow feed as a supplement for livestock, right?

It sounds simple.

You got it.

But.

So I'm voting for you.

Miles, before we let you go, I have to ask, how many cow puns do you thin made it into this final episode?

It felt like a lot.

I think we better move on.

At least.

Resolve to solve with Miles O'Brien.

As a co-production of Mobius Media and Arizona PBS you can watch the show at Azure resolve to solve.

This podcast is a productio of Central Sound at Arizona PBS.

Our video editors are Matthew Anderson and Macy Logan.

We get audio support from Joe Miller and Daniel Babic.

Our producer is Anna Williams.

Executive producers Alex Cusack, Carol Yanko, Scott willful, and Miles O'Brien.

I'm your host Elise Hu.

Thanks for joining us.