Science -- Porthole Opens Cow's Stomach To View

Peer into this tube and you'll be peering into the future. The tube is in the side of a cow - at one end, your eye, at the other, the cow's stomach. At this moment, Roger Calza is using it in hopes of changing what the animal eats.

PULLMAN - Roger Calza has a cow with a porthole into its stomach.

When he pulls a plug on the cow's side, he can look down a six-inch-wide plastic tube he surgically installed into a smelly bacterial sludge in the cow's first stomach chamber, or rumen, that turns the animal into a walking compost pile.

"A compost pile is simple compared to a cow gut," elaborated the Washington State University agricultural professor.

Calza's goal is to make cow stomach micro-organisms such as bacteria and fungi more efficient than they are now, allowing the animal to digest straw or other agricultural wastes and saving on animal feed.

"A cow could take this lousier feed and still make plenty of milk and meat," he explains.

To understand what Calza is up to, consider what any child knows: that cows eat grass.

Well, yes and no. Cows chew and swallow grass, but it's the bacteria and fungi in the 200-quart-sized rumen that eat it. These microscopic creatures break the grass down while multiplying wildly. The cow in turn feeds on these micro-organisms in its secondary stomachs.

"She eats pounds and pounds and pounds of micro-organisms as she grows," the scientist explained. "She gives them a way to grow

inside her, and then swallows them."

This cooperative process helps explain how plant-eating animals grow into the biggest land creatures on Earth. "All these micro-organisms ask is for the cow to swallow 20 to 40 pounds of food a day," Calza said.

So critical are bacteria and fungi to a cow's digestion that nursing calves must pick them up from remnants of the mother's feces on her body, which the calf inadvertently licks.

To help the internal compost pile along, the cow burps to help turn the sludge and regurgitates its cud for chewing, actions with the same purpose as turning a garden compost pile with a pitchfork.

The cow has a variety of micro-organisms at work in her stomach to digest the feed. Some are fungi, relatively complex particles thousands of times bigger than bacteria. Fungi are particularly effective breaking down the waxy cellulose and glue-like lignins that turn plants stiff and hard, like straw or wood.

If a cow could convert stiffer stubble into fungus-food, and then consume the fungi, winter feed could be stretched with cheap stuff like straw: a significant improvement given millions of hungry cattle.

The porthole has helped WSU scientists better understand how cow digestion works. While the surgery was not pleasant for the cow, Calza said she is enjoying a long, natural life with good care. That life would be cut short at the slaughterhouse if she were left alone as a farm animal.

What the scientist and his laboratory staff has done is scoop out the digestive micro-organisms, isolate the fungi that appear most efficient at feeding on waste agricultural products, put them into an incubator that serves as an artificial cow stomach, and use them to experimentally break down straw. "We have isolated the fungi that appears to be the most effective on Earth," he said.

They have published more than 20 scientific papers on the process. Next step? "It would be taking an organism we devise in the laboratory, putting it in the cow, and then we eat the cow," he explained. The fungi would consume straw that the microorganisms presently snub.

What Calza has not done yet is receive funding or a permit from the federal government to transplant large numbers of the fungi to live cattle.

"It's not politically correct," he complained. Regulators are wary of toying with cattle digestion, and the U.S. is not in any desperate need to stretch its cattle feed.

But Calza thinks his research has a future. "There is a perception in America that the food supply is plentiful and always will be plentiful," he said. "I think they're wrong on that. A lot of science we're just not ready for, but we soon may be ready for a cow that can digest five or seven percent more of its feed."