‘A Little Dystopian’: Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates Bankrolling Methane Vaccine for Cattle

Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos are funding the development of a vaccine designed to reduce the methane produced by cattle.

by Brenda Baletti, Ph.D.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is investing $9.4 million to develop a vaccine designed to reduce the number of methane-producing microbes in a cow’s stomach, Agriland reported.

The funding comes from his Bezos Earth Fund, a philanthropy he established with $10 billion in 2020. The fund intends to distribute all of its money by 2030, by funding projects to “fight climate change and protect nature.”

Researchers at the United Kingdom’s Pirbright Institute and Royal Veterinary College, and New Zealand’s AgResearch are among the groups receiving funding to research how a vaccine could reduce the methane emitted by cows as they digest and expel food through manure, flatulence and burping.

“Vaccines have proven to be an incredibly cost-effective way to deliver global health solutions,” said Bezos Earth Fund President and CEOAndrew Steer in a press release. “If we can apply this approach to vaccinate cattle and reduce emissions, the scalability and impact could be phenomenal.”

Although scientists have sporadically researched methane vaccines for over four decades, no vaccine yet exists. The project’s first goal is to show that such a vaccine is possible.

“This grant is a moonshot for proof-of-concept — risky bets like this are essential to tackling the climate crisis,” Steer said, according to Agriland.

The researchers will study how methanogens, or methane-producing microbes, colonize the digestive tract of calves and how their immune system responds to those methanogens.

Researchers will then determine which antibodies would effectively target the methanogens, as the first step in developing the criteria for their methane vaccine.

Professor John Hammond, Immunogenetics Group leader at the Pirbright Institute, said that before they could develop a methane vaccine, they had to first define “what a successful vaccine needs to achieve. By understanding the precise antibody responses required, we can provide a clear path forward for vaccine development.”

“This approach reduces the trial-and-error aspect and focuses on targeted, high-resolution immunology,” Hammond added. Researchers can use that knowledge to trigger an immune response in cattle that will inhibit methane production, he said.

Crop scientist and regenerative farmer Howard Vlieger told The Defender such a vaccine could be damaging to cows because it is being designed to target the organisms living in cows’ digestive system — organisms the animals need to digest fiber.

Vlieger cited research on glyphosate showing that when necessary microorganisms in a cow’s rumen are eliminated, even in small amounts, it seriously affects the animal’s health.

However, Hammond said dramatic interventions are necessary to cut global methane emissions.

“Vaccination is a widely accepted farming practice that is auditable and can be used in combination with other strategies, such as chemical inhibition, selection for low-methane genetics or early-life interventions to permanently alter microbiome composition in livestock,” he said, according to Agriland.

But Vliegar said that regenerative farmers take a different approach, which is to be attentive to cattle nutrition and to keep their cattle in balance with the environment.

Bill Gates also funding methane vaccine

Shortly after the Bezos Earth Fund announced in August that it was funding the methane vaccine, ag-biotech startup ArkeaBio announced it also had raised $38.5 million to develop a methane vaccine.

Investors include the Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Rabo Ventures, the Grantham Foundation and others. The Series A funding ArkeaBio announced was from its second round of funding.

Breakthrough Energy had fully funded its previous seed funding round with $12 million, Axios reported.

Gates founded Breakthrough Energy in 2015 to fund start-ups focused on innovating to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Bezos and other well-known billionaires, including Richard Branson and Jack Ma, are also investors.

That means Bezos is funding the methane vaccine through his for-profit investment group and his philanthropic organization.

So is Gates. The Pirbright Institute, which receives Bezos grant funding for the methane vaccine, will use technologies developed in its Pirbright Livestock Antibody Hub, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Both the Bezos Earth Fund and the ArkeaBio initiatives were launched following a meeting in Dubai in 2023, during which the Gates Foundation brought together approximately 40 interested parties to discuss expanding a global effort to develop a methane-reducing vaccine, Beef Central reported.

The meeting included the few researchers working on methane vaccines and potential investors, vaccine producers and regulators who will need to sign off on a vaccine once it is developed. Researchers predict that will happen within five years.

Paul Wood of the Global Methane Hub organized the meeting. Promotional materials and media reports about the vaccine cite the hub’s claim that reducing methane emissions by 45% by 2030 could cool the earth by 0.3 degrees Celsius as justification for why the vaccine is needed.

The Global Methane Hub is also funded by the Gates Foundation and the Bezos Earth Fund. Google, which produces tens of millions of metric tons of carbon per year, also is a funder.

Gates said it is imperative to address the issue of cows when it comes to global emissions.

As Microsoft founder Gates, Amazon and Google pour money into changing the biology of cows to reduce methane, their own carbon footprints are soaring due to the increased energy needed to power their artificial intelligence.

Wood said the Global Methane Hub is also pushing for countries to sign the Global Methane Pledge, which aims to reduce methane from fossil fuels and livestock by 30% between 2020 and 2030.

He said the methane pledge stimulated investments of up to $200 million into the Global Methane Hub research program.

‘A little dystopian’

“The whole thing feels a little dystopian,” according to Axios, “but agribusiness sailed over the dystopian hurdle long ago.”

ArkeaBio CEO Colin South said other strategies — including breeding, feed additives and gene editing microbiomes in the rumen — all could address the methane issue. But a vaccine would be a “holy grail in methane mitigation,” because it could scale easily.

Although their focus is cattle, he said, he thought the vaccine could also be used for other species.

The company says it doesn’t yet have a viable product but aims to have something soon that will reduce methane by 15-20% for three to six months and be administered to cattle twice a year.

South said the idea for the vaccine has been around for a long time, “but there has never been the confluence of money, markets, and technology to make it happen until pretty recently.”

Will Harris: ‘Cattle are like carbon converting machines’

Regenerative cattle farmer Will Harris said the whole project is unnecessary because cattle are actually good for greenhouse gas emissions.

When properly grazed on well-managed rangeland, rather than in confinement, “cattle are like carbon converting machines,” a reality that Harris has demonstrated on his Georgia farm.

Excess greenhouse gases are a problem, he said, but technological fixes like this one are not the right solution. He said such interventions generate unanticipated problems that require more technological fixes — a never-ending cycle he said began with the post-WWII shift to industrial agriculture.

“Since then it has become a real game,” Harris said. “And big tech companies solve problems that create another problem requiring another solution. It’s never-ending and a lot of money is being made on it, and it’s not being made by the farmer and it’s not being made by the consumer.”

Harris said he believes people have broken the carbon cycle, but they’ve also broken the water cycle, the mineral cycle and the microbial cycle.

“There is more discussion of the carbon cycle,” he said, “because it is easily monetized — there is a lot of money to be made in technological climate fixes. There are also a lot of people out to vilify cattle,” he said, “and it is unjust.”