(Bloomberg) —
The Bezos Earth Fund is putting money into research programs to breed climate-smart cattle as part of efforts to curb the environmental impact of livestock.
The Jeff Bezos-backed philanthropic organization is funding $19 million for an initiative to help identify genetic traits in low-methane emission cattle and sheep, it said Tuesday. The research, spread across the Americas, Europe, Africa and Oceania, will involve scanning more than 100,000 animals to generate data to help predict methane-emitting traits, which will be used for breeding.
“We’re going to measure their emissions, we’re going to measure their genetics, we’re going to measure the microbiome in the rumen,” Andy Jarvis, the Bezos Earth Fund’s director of future of food, said in an interview. “You put all of that together, and then we can predict the likely methane emissions.”
Food systems — encompassing everything from growing and processing food to consuming it or throwing it away — account for about a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Much of that footprint is linked to livestock farming, a major source of methane that’s 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.
Farmers have for centuries bred cattle to improve milk yields and make them more fertile or resistant to diseases. Because emissions vary even within the same herd, scientists say selecting and breeding for lower-methane traits can lead to big and permanent reductions in emissions, the Bezos Earth Fund said.
The approach won’t require farmers to change how they feed or raise livestock. It will probably take two to three years to get the data in place, before the methane scores appear in bull catalogues, according to Jarvis.
“Once we’ve got enough of a data set, that starts then feeding into breeding programs,” he said. “Breeders can start selecting for that and farmers can start selecting for it. It’s kind of an elegant solution.”
The funding is part of a $1 billion commitment to tackle food’s impact on climate and nature. The Bezos Earth Fund has already announced a total of $239 million for food and farming, and will allocate the remaining $761 million by 2030. The work so far has included establishing research centers for improving alternative proteins and research into vaccines and feed to curb livestock emissions.
Tuesday’s announcement forms a total of $27.4 million from the Bezos Earth Fund and Global Methane Hub, an alliance to support reducing emissions of the gas. Recipients of the grants will include the Wageningen University in the Netherlands, Angus Foundation and University of Nebraska.
© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.
