The newest farmhands are tiny, pink and love devouring methane

Petaluma, California — The cows had to be deterred from messing with the experiment.

Researchers from a Bay Area technology company had come to the sprawling dairy farm north of San Francisco to test an emerging solution to planet-warming emissions: microscopic pink organisms that eat methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

Kenny Correia, 35, of Correia Family Dairy, watched the team from Windfall Bio working near the lagoons used to store manure from the farm’s several hundred cows. The researchers erected a futuristic system of vats, pipes, tubes and shiny metal supports. Then, when everything was assembled, they poured pink liquid into one of the vats. “They were looking like mad scientists out there,” Correia recounted.

He acknowledged initially thinking it was a “crazy idea” to integrat