The cow-centric project, as reported by Ben Schiller for Fast Company, is as much performance art as state-of-the-art technology performance:
“Each cow apparently passes enough gas to power a car or a fridge. Imagine the possibilities…. The project from Argentina’s National Institute of Agricultural Technology is only a proof-of-concept at this stage. But it is intriguing. Researchers put plastic backpacks on cows, then inserted tubes into their rumens (their biggest digestive tract). They extracted the methane—about 300 liters a day. That’s enough to run a car, or a fridge for 24 hours.”