At first glance, the Riswick farm is just another modern agricultural facility: in the middle of broad cultivated fields stand recently built barns, similar to so many other farms across Europe.

But Riswick is a model experimental farm in the small town of Kleve, located 460 kilometres southwest of Berlin and a few kilometres from Germany’s border with the Netherlands. The agricultural department of the University of Bonn is in charge of running it.

Riswick this year will become the first German research centre to study methane emissions from cattle, which are a major source of the greenhouse-effect gases that cause global warming.

Read more … (IPS)