When it comes to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions like methane, data is everything. Or as the industry idiom goes, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure,” Francisco Norris, CEO of ZELP, told AgNavigator.
Founded in 2017, UK-based ZELP has been developing devices to measure and reduce methane emissions from livestock, given agriculture’s contribution to GHG emissions.
Out of the 600 million tonnes of methane emitted into the atmosphere, 60% come from human activities with nearly half associated with agriculture production, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
This is where ZELP Sense comes in.
On Aug. 26, the agtech company revealed ZELP Sense, “a low cost, very practical device for continuously measuring methane and carbon dioxide emissions from individual cows in real-world settings,” Norris explained. ZELP Sense is placed near a cow’s nostril, with the device also providing a dry matter intake estimation through a beta feature, Norris added.
This data is then sent in near real-time to ZELP Insight, where farmers can track methane emissions of individual cows, he added.
ZELP Sense’s development was supported by grant funding from the Global Methane Hub’s $200 million Enteric Fermentation R&D Accelerator.
The wearable device will launch in Australia, EU, New Zealand, North America, and the UK and has already garnered a number of pre-orders from feed additive, animal health, and corporate customers, Norris noted. ZELP plans to manufacture thousands of these devices but has capacity to scale quickly as the company explores other markets for the technology, he added.
Looking ahead, ZELP is focusing the next year on supporting demand for this device among companies, researchers, governments, and GHG mitigators, while pursuing a future equity raise to support broader commercial deployment, Norris said.
Additionally, the company is continuing its work on a wearable device, ZELP Mitigate, that can mitigate methane emissions, he added.
“The ideal scenario for us in the longer term is that methane measurement becomes a much more practical, a much more scalable and routine type of activity across the livestock industry, and that this continues to help, in an ever-increasing way, mitigation efforts and productivity improvements across this supply chain,” he elaborated.
