Certainly. Thanks for the question.
The first thing I'd point out is that, as I mentioned earlier, over a 30-year period we managed to reduce our emissions, per kilogram of beef, by 15%. That was between 1981 and 2011. Those dates are important, because that was before the beef industry really started to pay very specific attention to the environment. It was always understood that the environment was important, because so many of these are intergenerational farms and you're not going to keep these things going if you're not taking care of the environment you're living and working in.
Those improvements—and this is getting to the research point—happen because of steady incremental improvements in plant breeding, animal breeding, animal nutrition, animal health and so on. All of those things stack up together, not only to improve production efficiency and productivity but also to reduce emissions. In order to move forward, we need to do two things. One is to continue those investments in the steady, slow incremental things that have generated those improvements and will continue to, but the other is to invest in some of the more novel things that are very specifically environmentally focused.
A couple of examples—the ones that I mentioned actually—are nutritional supplements. There are a few of them. Some of them are kind of mundane. They are just simple dietary things. Feeding distillers' grains that are left over from biofuel production has been shown to reduce emissions by 5%. There are a number of more novel ones like biochar, algae, lemongrass, sprouted barley and whatnot. Those are, I would say, unproven. They've certainly been investigated in the lab, but before you know whether they're effective in cattle, you need to do large-scale feeding trials. Those haven't been done yet and that's important, because if cows don't eat it you're not going to get the benefit.
There are a couple of new additives that have been tested and are showing promise. Probably the most promising one is a product called 3-NOP, which is developed by a Dutch company called Royal DSM. The product name is Bovaer. The point is that this feed additive can reduce emissions by 20% to 70% in feedlot diets. That's not lab stuff. That's not modelling. That's work that's been done in large-scale commercial feedlot trials.