Livestock play an important role in society — they nourish our communities, support livelihoods, and contribute to the preservation of grasslands and biodiversity. These benefits, however, come at an environmental cost, including that livestock enteric methane emissions alone (or cow ‘burps’) have contributed nearly 0.1°C of global warming — a figure that could reach 0.25°C by 2100. In fact, enteric methane accounts for 25% of all human-caused methane emissions, a concerning figure given that atmospheric levels are rising faster than ever recorded. While carbon dioxide is the most abundant greenhouse gas, methane has a global warming potential over 80 times greater than CO2 over 20 years. Addressing methane emissions in livestock systems offers a powerful lever for near-term climate impact that shouldn't be ignored.
Many current solutions targeting enteric methane emissions focus on human-fed livestock and lack a clear pathway for implementation in pasture-based systems — which accounts for the vast majority of enteric methane. To achieve significant and sustained reductions in emissions in these systems, we might need entirely new approaches that look nothing like the approaches we've used so far. Incentive-based competitions, like those offered by XPRIZE, provide a unique platform for this purpose; they promote approach-agnostic ideation, democratize innovation, build collaborative communities, and empower bold novel ideas to drive systemic change.
Recently, XPRIZE and AgNext held a Moonshot Workshop where experts from across the livestock industry gathered to brainstorm ideas for the first XPRIZE in animal agriculture. An XPRIZE competition could drive the innovation required to reduce enteric methane emissions on a global scale, turning an urgent climate challenge into innovative solutions that build a more sustainable and resilient future.
XPRIZE is a non-profit organization founded 30 years ago with a big, audacious goal: to solve humanity’s greatest challenges. The organization’s first competition, the Ansari Prize (2004), was designed to make private space travel commercially viable, a feat fairly unimaginable at the time. Teams worldwide spent a collective $100 million — ten times the prize amount — to build a reusable spaceship capable of carrying three people to at least 100 km above Earth twice in two weeks. Beyond attracting significant investment, the competition also spurred policy changes that allowed the beginning of a new private space industry with a billion-dollar market, paving the way for future possibilities like low-cost space tourism and moon mining.
Ensuring food security for the growing population while protecting the environment and animal welfare is among the most important challenges of our time. Societal attention to this issue also appears to be at an all-time high, leading to broader questions about the role of animal products in our diets and their place in a sustainable future. At the same time, farmed animals — especially those from smallholder systems in low-income countries — remain vital to human health, nutrition, cultural traditions, and prosperity.
The XPRIZE design process aims to address such multi-faceted challenges by bringing together a diverse group of professionals, from scientists and engineers to policymakers and industry leaders, to work toward a common goal. This multidisciplinary collaboration, rarely seen in animal agriculture, aims to identify root causes rather than merely addressing “symptoms”, aiming for long-term, transformational change that can reshape entire industries.
XPRIZE provides incentives for global innovation; participants from 137 countries have been involved in past competitions. This global approach is particularly relevant for animal agriculture, where challenges can vary significantly across different geographic locations and animal production systems. For example, enteric methane emissions intensities are greatest in low-income countries, where low animal productivity and reliance on smallholder pasture-based systems create different challenges than those faced in the U.S. and other nations with high-efficiency, confined production systems.
A significant barrier in addressing enteric methane worldwide is the low adoption rate for existing (and possibly future) solutions among farmers, who are less likely to adopt new technologies or practices unless they are both affordable and provide clear economic benefits. XPRIZE’s commitment to making solutions ‘affordable for all’ is exemplified by their active $120 million Water Scarcity XPRIZE, designed to make seawater desalination accessible, particularly for the Global South. A similar initiative could support the widespread adoption of enteric methane mitigation technologies in animal agriculture, ensuring solutions are both practical and impactful across diverse contexts.
XPRIZE requires physical demonstrations of proposed solutions, showing they work in the real world, not just in the lab. This would be particularly helpful for pasture-based systems, where livestock is handled infrequently, making solutions that rely on controlled intake, such as feed additives, less practical or ineffective. By requiring innovations to be tested and scaled in pasture conditions, XPRIZE can ensure a greater reach for deployment and a smoother transition into the marketplace.
Requiring demonstration can also drive the development of new measurement facilities or test protocols to measure success if not yet available at the time of the competition. For instance, for the Carbon XPRIZE (2015), XPRIZE partnered with the state of Wyoming and the province of Alberta to build a $50 million, cutting-edge testing facility for the competition. Analogous facilities would be highly beneficial in addressing enteric methane since very few facilities today are capable of measuring emissions. An XPRIZE competition could, therefore, also help drive progress in the Measurement, Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MMRV), supporting research efforts while also paving the way towards supporting financial incentives for farmers.
For certain challenges, what’s needed isn’t entirely new technologies but the acceleration of those already in development. XPRIZE leverages its network of world-renowned experts to identify solutions in various stages of readiness, selecting those that would benefit from the additional push a competition provides. Approaches to addressing pasture-based enteric methane are probably some mix of both early-stage approaches already contemplated and entirely new ideas. Emerging technologies for mitigating enteric methane currently at TLR 2-3, like methanogen-suppressing vaccines, could significantly benefit from an XPRIZE infusion to accelerate development, while approach-agnostic innovation funding could help bring forward ideas that haven’t yet been seriously explored.
As seen with the Ansari Prize, XPRIZE competitions can also expedite policy changes that bring innovations to market sooner than expected. These policy efforts must run in parallel with R&D to ensure smooth regulatory approval and a robust groundwork for on-farm deployment as soon as products become available. For example, the IFEED Act seeks to streamline the lengthy regulatory approval for certain feed additives in the U.S., but has yet to gain the traction needed for passage. An XPRIZE competition could spotlight such initiatives, potentially driving the attention and support needed to overcome these policy bottlenecks.
Throughout their history, each $1 of prize money has been amplified over 33x in additional impact post-competition, including millions of dollars in Advanced Market Commitments. XPRIZE competitions generate significant media attention, shift public and government perceptions of what can be accomplished, and encourage investors to explore opportunities in areas that were previously overlooked — all of which can help drive significant progress toward creating viable solutions for enteric methane mitigation.
At the workshop, we discussed a wide array of challenges currently impacting animal agriculture, from lack of incentives and undervaluation of ecosystem services to public perception and land loss — all interconnected and important in their own right. But “not all prizes are XPRIZES,” and this is our opportunity to pinpoint the key issue that can unlock real change.
If we can’t effectively tackle enteric methane emissions, efforts to restore rangelands, enhance soil carbon, and preserve biodiversity will continue to face obstacles. If we want animals to continue to serve these ecosystem services, we have to be able to deliver products that can operate within these systems and decrease negative climate impacts.
An XPRIZE focused on driving innovation towards accelerating solution development for livestock enteric methane mitigation could help reduce the largest sector of anthropogenic methane emissions (similar in climate impact to gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions per year) while engaging the global community towards approaches that work across geographies for pasture-based livestock.
An example concept for this prize would provide awards for approaches that demonstrate a reduction of methane in pasture-based systems by 50% in 5 years at the lowest demonstrated cost — all while ensuring animal and human health. A competition along these lines would help drive investment in this important space and prepare solutions for broad, global adoption.
The XPRIZE-AgNext workshop far exceeded my expectations. I was genuinely impressed by the diversity of participants, the shared excitement and enthusiasm for collaboration, and XPRIZE’s unique approach to addressing global challenges.
In recent years, my concerns about sustainability in animal agriculture have steadily increased as my understanding of the sector has grown. I’ve realized that traditional approaches are likely insufficient in navigating the intricacies of such a fragmented industry. Achieving transformational change requires transformational tools, and that’s exactly what XPRIZE could bring to the table.
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