Nebraska's beef industry: A look at the challenges facing one of the state's top exports

California is in the midst of a new gold rush, but the lucrative commodity at the center of it isn’t dug from the ground. It's the methane dairy cattle emit into the air.

In an effort to curb global climate change, the state set targets for reducing methane emissions and established financial incentives for dairy farmers to capture the greenhouse gas. The result is a system through which methane from manure is being turned into a renewable fuel.

ITHACA — In what’s been dubbed the “methane barn” at a University of Nebraska-Lincoln agricultural research center near here, sensitive electronic equipment monitors and logs the amount of gas belched out by a herd of yearling steers.

Yes, Andrea Watson and her fellow UNL scientists are studying cow burps. She has already heard all the jokes.

NORTH PLATTE — Trey Wasserburger figures he’s got half a decade invested in his cattle before he sells them to a meatpacker.

It starts with getting his Angus cows bred, then helping pull their calves, and weaning the young steers and heifers. Ultimately, they’re fattened with corn and other rations to a market weight of about 1,400 pounds, then sold and processed.

In a polarized U.S. Senate, Democrats Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker seldom agree with Republicans Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley.

But all seemed to be on the same page during a recent hearing in Washington probing whether a lack of competition in the meatpacking industry has led to unfair prices for the nation’s cattle producers and excessive prices for beef consumers.

On a recent “Feeder Flash,” a daily video on cattle markets produced for a Nebraska auction house, commentator Corbitt Wall noted that the major meatpackers were bidding on very few cattle across Kansas that week.

The packers, he said, were refusing to pay the going rate of $130 per hundredweight.