NBC: There may be another reason to discourage farmers from feeding antibiotics to livestock: global warming.
A study published this week finds that when cattle were fed a common antibiotic, their manure produced even more methane than normal -- a potent global warming gas.
The antibiotics do this by killing off bacteria that compete with methane-producing microbes, the researchers report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
"To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of antibiotics...