🌐 How to Burp a Cow: Hoofprint Biome Makes More Milk, Less Methane

Pretty much since climate awareness became mainstream — or maybe since the 2006 release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth — one major source of greenhouse gas emissions has seemed almost impossible to solve: cow burps.

Livestock production — primarily cows — accounts for 12% to 19% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Cattle alone are responsible for about 30 percent of global methane emissions, one of the most powerful greenhouse gases.

Most of that methane is a natural byproduct of how cows and other ruminants process food. The cow’s rumen is a 40-gallon fermentation chamber. Microbes break down grass, hay, and forage — things humans can’t digest — and the byproducts of that process feed the cow.

The problem is a byproduct of the byproduct: up to 10 percent of a cow’s caloric intake can turn into methane and get released into the atmosphere through burps.

For years, the basic answer has been: eat less beef and drink less milk.

I can count on my fingers the number of people I know who have heeded that advice.

A few weeks ago in Raleigh, North Carolina, I spoke with Kathryn Polkoff, co-founder and CEO of Hoofprint Biome.

Hoofprint uses enzymes to reshape the cow’s rumen microbiome, cutting methane production while boosting dairy milk yield and beef cattle weight gain.

No harsh chemical feed additives.

No asking farmers to produce less.

A natural solution that changes digestion inside the cow, so instead of that energy escaping as methane, more of it turns into milk or weight gain.

Kathryn and her co-founder, Scott Collins, both received their PhDs from NC State. They started Hoofprint just three years ago, and the company already has backing from SOSV, Breakthrough Energy, and Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund — a syndicate spanning biotech, climate tech, and ag tech.

For climate folks, Hoofprint also raises a more uncomfortable point: this company could not exist without AI.

Not because it is making chatbots.

Because it uses AI to search the dark matter of microbial DNA, identify enzymes that nature has already created, and adapt them to one of the most stubborn climate problems in agriculture. Kathryn described Hoofprint as an AI-native company — not AI-enabled, not AI-assisted, but built around tools that made the biology searchable in the first place.

The biology was already there. Without AI, the ability to find it at startup speed was not.

Hoofprint is not asking farmers to care more about climate. It is turning lost feed energy into a product farmers already understand: better animal productivity.

Here’s what stood out from our conversation.

Methane isn't just a climate problem. It's a tax on every cow.

"The methane is actually a cost to the cows. It costs up to 12% of feed energy. So you can have this opportunity for a win-win: get rid of the methane and make the cows more efficient, make the farmers more money."

The startup thesis: nature already solved the problem.

"Nature's been around forever, and it's probably already solved whatever problem we need to solve. Why don't we just figure out whatever nature did?"

Finding nature's solution on a fundable timetable requires AI.

"Mining the dark matter of microbial DNA is figuring out what nature did and how we can adapt it to be what we need it to be. We didn't even know what a protein looked like, but now we have AlphaFold, and we can know what any protein looks like."

AI tools compressed what could have taken 20 years of research into one year.

Climate dependency was never the plan.

"We can't be a company that's dependent on carbon offsets. That will work for a period of years until it doesn't. Either you have a sustainable business model, or you don't. Company sustainability is sustainability."

The product has to fit the feed wagon.

"Enzymes have been used in animal feed additives for decades and decades. Farmers are very used to looking at yeast and enzymes and saying, I get what I do with this — I put it in the feed."

The ambition is every cow in the world. The challenge is that every cow is different.

"This is a product that we want to have in every cow in the world. And turns out everybody all over the world raises their cows wildly differently."

Scale means building a product that works across radically different farming systems — not just the ones that are easiest to reach first.

Love the mission and know it better than anyone.

"If you're just gonna start a company, it's very painful. So you have to love the mission. And it also has to be something you're really, really good at and know better than anyone else in the world. For Scott and I, those two things overlapped at cattle and microbiome."

Why North Carolina? Where else are you going to put the cows?

When investors asked why Hoofprint wasn't in Boston or San Francisco: "We were like, yeah, but where are we going to put our cows?"

For a company built around cattle biology, the lab and the cow need to be in the same place. That place was NC State University, in the heart of the Raleigh-Durham startup ecosystem, surrounded by thousands upon thousands of acres of farmland.

Supercool Takeaway

Hoofprint reached Series A in three years by building something farmers actually want to buy. The methane reduction follows. The carbon story follows.

Operator Takeaways

Lead with the farmer, not the climate. Hoofprint's pitch to farmers is more milk and more meat. The methane reduction is real and significant — but it is not what gets the product into the feed wagon.

The cap table is part of the product. Hoofprint deliberately built a syndicate across biotech, climate tech, and ag tech. Each investor type brings a different network, a different set of challenges they've seen before, and a different set of doors they can open.

This Week’s Podcast Episode:

How to Burp a Cow: Hoofprint Biome Makes More Milk, Less Methane

🎙️ Listen on Apple, Spotify, and all other platforms.

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Where Supercool Traveled This Week

SPEAKING

I was on a panel discussing climate solutions in the built environment for the Climatebase Fellowship, an accelerator helping climate-focused professionals supercharge their careers.

PODCASTS

Curiosity Class: He’s Replacing Grass with Trees

RealDealChat: They're Building Homes with Grass. It Actually Works. w/ Josh Dorfman

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