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ARS Home » Midwest Area » Madison, Wisconsin » U.S. Dairy Forage Research Center » Dairy Forage Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #426727
Research Project: Forage and Feed Characteristics on Performance, Feed Efficiency, Environmental Impact, and Farm Nutrient Cycling of Dairy Production Systems

Location: Dairy Forage Research

Title: Experimental and experiential recommendations for using GreenFeed systems to measure gas flux in cattle in grazing and fed systems

Author
item French, Elizabeth
item BECK, MATTHEW - Texas A&M Agrilife
item Kalscheur, Kenneth
item JARAMILLO, DAVID - US Department Of Agriculture (USDA)
item DERNER, JUSTIN - US Department Of Agriculture (USDA)
item MOFFET, COREY - US Department Of Agriculture (USDA)
item NEVILLE, BRYAN - US Department Of Agriculture (USDA)
item SODER, KATHY - US Department Of Agriculture (USDA)
item O'CONNER, RORY - US Department Of Agriculture (USDA)
item KOZIEL, JACEK - US Department Of Agriculture (USDA)
item VADAS, PETER - US Department Of Agriculture (USDA)
item MOELLER, STEVEN - US Department Of Agriculture (USDA)
item GUNTER, STACEY - US Department Of Agriculture (USDA)

Submitted to: MethodsX
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 10/5/2025
Publication Date: 10/20/2025
Citation: French, E.A., Beck, M.R., Kalscheur, K., Jaramillo, D.M., Derner, J.D., Moffet, C.A., Neville, B.W., Soder, K.J., O'Conner, R.C., Koziel, J.A., Vadas, P., Moeller, S., Gunter, S.A. 2025. Recommendations for using GreenFeed systems to measure gas flux in cattle in grazing and fed systems. MethodsX. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mex.2025.103667.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mex.2025.103667

Interpretive Summary: Measuring gas fluxes on ruminant animals in confinement and grazing conditions is critical to evaluate production efficiency for farmers and ranchers. Previously methods to measure gas fluxes are labor-intensive, expensive, or remove animals from their routine environment. This manuscript provides guidance based on field experience using the GreenFeed turn key system in beef and dairy systems across all stages of life. We provide guidance on proper set-up for different environments for cattle, training cattle to use the machine, proper maintenance, and nutritional considerations used for bait feed in the unit. By providing our combined best practices, we will improve our ability to conduct proper methodology for comparing across research groups. The impact of this paper is to make more informed decisions for U.S. farmers and ranchers on improving production efficiency for cattle systems, whether on beef or dairy systems, in confinement or grazing.

Technical Abstract: Improving ruminant animal production efficiency is contingent on more accurately measuring gas fluxes from individual animals in actual grazing and confined feeding environments. Prior efforts have used 1) whole-body respiratory chambers but this removes animals from their natural environments and activities, 2) sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) tracer release techniques but his is labor intensive and integrative over time which prevents diurnal estimates, and 3) stationary head box systems that are labor intensive in addition to removing animals for their production environment. Here, we provide recommendations for using the next generation technology, the GreenFeed turn-key system for measuring individual animal gas fluxes of methane (CH4), carbon dioxide (CO2), oxygen (O2), and hydrogen (H2) in production environments of both grazing and confined-fed cattle. We cover setup of the systems, maintenance, calibration of gases, and numbers of animals to sample, training on use of the system, and bait feeds – including type, composition, and mass. Further, we address operational considerations of using the GreenFeed systems in extensive grazing environments and confined feeding operations. We provide data recommendations including pre-processing data, data cleaning, handling outliers, approaches for estimating individual animal gas fluxes, and uses of application performance interfaces (API) in conjunction with R for statistical analyses. Our collective combined experimental and experiential evidence provided here for the GreenFeed systems is an effort to produce recommendations of “best practices” that can be used to assist in standardizing the measurement and analyses of gas fluxes in grazing and confined cattle. This will enhance cross-experiment comparisons resulting in more robust assessments of cattle production efficiencies.