We have to stop these cows burping

But, as any budding farmers out there will tell you, stopping cows burping would be a major contributor to tackling climate change!

Through the digestion of grass, cows produce approximately four per cent of greenhouse gas emissions.

Cow burps produce methane, an important greenhouse gas that is 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

It seems that our eating habits also contribute to global warming. Before you decide to give up on eating cheese, butter or dare I say it hamburgers, you might like to know that German scientists have developed what they claim to be an "anti-burp" pill.

A sort of bovine antacid, I suppose.

When I first heard of this development, my initial reaction was to think about how such a pill could be administered.

It surely wouldn't be practical to dose up your cow on a daily basis, especially as they spend most of their days out in the field.

Trying to give a pill during milking time would surely upset the cow and reduce milk yields.

Of course, the boffins had already come up with a solution for that difficulty and produced a fist-sized pill (imagine swallowing that!), which would dissolve in the cow's system over a period of many months (known as a bolus).

The effect of the pill is to change the chemical reaction that occurs during digestion from a fermentation process to a more complete reaction.

This would change the waste product of digestion from methane to glucose.

It is claimed that this would help the well-being of the cow and produce more milk yields, as the production of glucose rather than methane would divert to milk production instead of burping.

As with human diet pills, the bolus cannot act alone, apparently.

The scientists behind the project have issued a phrase probably familiar to most dieters: "can only aid cows if used alongside a special diet and strictly scheduled feeding times".

What the scientists have not reported is how much the new pill reduces the methane burden of cow burps.

Since an average cow burps or breaks wind in the region of 600 litres per day, it would be interesting to find out what effect it had on the table manners of their test subjects.

If it works on a larger scale, the new drug could be of major interest to countries seeking to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

It is estimated that livestock causes one-seventh of the greenhouse gas emissions for Australia.

Feeding their cows and sheep with anti-burp pills could have the same effect as removing thousands of vehicles from the roads in Australia.

I am sure that if politicians can take the suggestion of anti-burp pills seriously and they can be shown to work on a large scale, many countries will look on this technology as a "quick fix".