The University of Idaho’s dairy-anchored Center for Agriculture, Food and the Environment taking shape near Rupert was a draw for new UI Extension air quality specialist Gilbert Miito.

Idaho CAFE will be the largest research dairy in the U.S. when it starts milking operations near Rupert in early 2026, according to UI. The facility will have 400 cows initially and grow to capacity gradually, accommodating up to 2,500 animals.

The second phase of construction is underway, including maternity and research barns, commodity storage, lagoons, and a building with office and classroom space.

“There is a lot of buzz around dairy farms and emissions, so there is a lot of opportunity around that,” Miito said in a news release. “The fact that we have CAFE as a research center, I think that improves our chances of getting a lot of these research grants.”

The Twin Falls-based Miito, who started Jan. 6 with UI, grew up on a dairy near Masaka, Uganda.

He researched manure management and emissions as a doctoral student at Washington State University and as a University of Missouri postdoctoral researcher he worked with manure management systems. He worked for a California company for which he designed, built and supervised assembly of biological treatment systems that filter liquid dairy waste.

Miito has begun gathering baseline emissions data from the CAFE site, according to UI. His work will focus on identifying best practices for managing, transporting, storing and using manure to minimize emissions of greenhouse gases such as methane.

He has teamed up with USDA researchers in Kimberly to aid in federal dairy emission studies. Some projects have involved working with commercial dairymen. He has helped USDA research emissions from manure spread over research plots and from lagoon water applied via sprinkler pivots.

In a whole-farm study, researchers are “getting to understand all of the processes on a dairy farm and how they contribute to emissions,” Miito said. A goal is to “understand the hot spots on a dairy farm and then do some mitigations to test.”

Most dairy emissions come from the combination of enteric emissions — essentially methane and ammonia emitted through the mouth, resulting from fermentation of feed in the rumen, according to UI — and from dairy manure.

Miito plans to evaluate various feed additives to change cows’ biochemistry to minimize enteric emissions. He intends to study a few options to minimize emissions from lagoons — such as trapping emissions and flaring them off, and adding sulfuric acid to chemically change lagoon water and reduce ammonia emissions.

Separating solid and liquid waste is another proven strategy to reduce emissions, according to UI. He intends to study the environmental benefits of more frequent cleaning of solids from dairy lagoons, and the use of improved technology for separating dairy liquids and solids.

Miito will research how the designs of barns and ventilation systems affect emissions, and benefits from regular cleaning of pens.

He plans to advocate for the industry and communicate about its realities to the public, according to UI.

“I am a link between the science and all of the noise out there, so I can easily tell whoever is making that noise,” Miito said. “‘Hey, this is how the numbers look. We need the dairy production. This is a byproduct and this is how we can deal with it.’”