Before I became a scientist, I was a kid in a small town in New Zealand, where dairy farming was the main industry.  Even as a child in the late 90s and early 2000s, enteric methane was a hot topic across the nation. At the time, there were proposals from the government to tax ‘cow farts’ - which never made sense to me, since animal protein is so important for healthy diets, and there were no technologies available to help farmers mitigate the methane produced by their livestock.

When I co-founded Number 8 Bio, I was a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University, working in the field of metabolic engineering, where the aim is to direct the flow of carbon and energy in microorganisms to get them to produce useful products. It was an amazing space because I got to work at the coal-face of microbiology, making discoveries and harnessing microbes to generate value.

Being raised in a farming town, I’ve always held a deep appreciation for agriculture. It’s the industry that sustains our society and allows us the freedom to pursue careers beyond hunting and gathering. As I gained expertise in microbiology during my time at Macquarie University, I learned that cow burps - sadly, not farts - are actually wasted nutrition from pasture and animal feed. I realised that there was an enormous opportunity to reduce this economic loss for farmers, while enabling them to provide even more value to society through emissions reduction. Better still, the underlying cause of this wastage is the microorganisms in the rumen - which I had unique experience in engineering.

Once I came to this realisation, it was clear to me that there was nothing more valuable I could do with my time than apply my skills to solving this problem for producers. I therefore left academia to establish Number 8 Bio together with fellow scientist, Dr Alex Carpenter, where we are on track to convert methane from a climate problem into an extraordinary opportunity for farmers. Thanks for coming along on our journey, we’re excited to share it with you.

— Dr Tom Williams