Although cows and aquaculture might seem like two utterly distinct interests, Gardner has found a clever way to combine them to tackle one of humanity’s most pressing problems: climate change…
Luke Gardner spends workdays surrounded by bubbling vats of seaweed and tanks of abalone at Moss Landing Marine Lab but trades his lab coat for work boots on weekends to head to his cattle ranch. Although cows and aquaculture might seem like two utterly distinct interests, Gardner has found a clever way to combine them to tackle one of humanity’s most pressing problems: climate change. Gardner and his wife began ranching in 2014 when they took the reins from his father-in-law. In the rolling hills above the Carmel coast, he grazes about 100 cattle on land owned by the Monterey Peninsula Regional Park District.
“I became much more aware of cattle ranching and the realities of it,” he says, “including the environmental impacts.”
The key to solving one of those impacts – the heat-trapping, gaseous burps of cattle – might just lie in Gardner’s soupy vats of seaweed growing at his lab. In some ways, the grazing cattle is beneficial, as Gardner moves them around under the guidance of biologists to help maintain coastal prairie habitat – California’s native grasslands which support several endangered species, and which have declined 99% since European settlement. But cattle are also warming the planet. A single cow burps more than 200 pounds of methane in a year, a powerful greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change as it lurks in the atmosphere. So Gardner, an aquaculture scientist, is identifying native seaweeds that can be added to cattle feed to soothe their gassy gut. Having an appreciation for the realities of ranching, he believes, puts him in a good position to join different interests together to find solutions to a common problem.
