Animal husbandry and soil are both large sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Read more about the causes and effects below.
Animal husbandry
Animal husbandry is the management and care of farm animals including the development of genetic qualities and behaviour, considered to be advantageous to humans. Livestock production is an integral part of many farming systems. Historically, environmental impacts of livestock production have related to overgrazing, desertification and pollution of water supplies.
To date, there’s a growing concern of the greenhouse gas emissions attributed to livestock. Methane released to the atmosphere by domestic ruminant livestock represents a large global source of methane.
Livestock emissions monitoring
Methane emission of cows is not only a concern for the environment but creates also a loss of energy for food production. Methane emissions are related to energy loss of feed intake (2-12%). Recent studies suggest that it’s possible to reduce the methane emissions from livestock and by that reduce the feed costs by selecting more feed-efficient animals. Accurate measurement of gas emissions from large number of individual animals however requires fast and automatic gas monitoring systems capable for large-scale measurements. Improving the long-term air quality in animal shelters requires from gas analysers the capability to operate in the presence of high moisture and dust, corrosive gases and widely varying gas concentrations.
Cantilever enhanced photoacoustics provides the sensitivity, repeatability and wide dynamic measurement range to livestock emissions monitoring and to controlling the air quality of shelters. Combined with optical filters or tunable laser sources it provides the selectivity to compensate the interfering gas components offering a solution to near real-time multi-gas monitoring of animal emissions and air quality for animal husbandry. Read more about GASERA ONE GHG greenhouse gas analyser.
Soil analysis
Measurement of soil and mineral samples with photoacoustic spectroscopy
Analysis of soil is done to determine compounds of the sample, to analyze the nutrients, to analyse greenhouse gases (GHG) or other gas emissions and to analyse contamination. Spectroscopic techniques are suitable for all above-mentioned purposes and are especially good for identifying organic compounds, minerals and contaminants.
In gaseous phase studies the need usually is to identify emissions of soil in situ in order to evaluate the climatic effects. In these studies the most interesting gases are greenhouse gases. Gaseous phase studies can also be done to evaluate need for fertilization by measuring ratio of N2O and NH3 from the soil. The GASERA ONE PULSE can be tailored for the most demanding soil analysis needs.
In solid phase analysis, the photoacoustic FTIR accessory PA301 provides a unique and versatile solution. The most striking benefit of the PA301 is easy and rapid sampling since the soil sample can be directly analysed without any treatment. The result spectrum can be used for compound identification and quantification and even the most absorbing samples can be analysed.
