Real-Time Visualization of Methane Emission at Commercial Dairy Farms

Abstract

The Dutch government has set an objective to reduce greenhouse gasses (GHG) emissions to 116 Mton CO2-equivalent in 2030. The agriculture sector aims for 11–23 Mton of GHG emission by 2050 and thus contributes to this objective. For this sector, the major contributor to the GHG emission in the Netherlands is the dairy sector. Before any mitigation strategies can be enrolled, some key facts need to be measured regarding the GHG emission on a farm. One of these key facts is the establishment of the baseline of GHG emission on a farm (and per cow). For this, we previously have built an infrastructure to measure and collect methane and carbon dioxide (near) real-time on a farm. The next challenges, addressed in the current study, were to (1) combine the private methane data, collected real-time through the infrastructure, with open source weather information, and (2) visualize both data streams for farmers, by developing an application that can be viewed on a web or mobile phone platform.