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Dietary intervention to reduce methane emissions from lactating dairy cattle is both environmentally and nutritionally desirable due to the importance of methane as a causative agent in global warming and as a significant loss of feed energy. Reliable prediction systems for methane production over a range of dietary inputs could be used to develop novel dietary regimes for the limitation of feed energy loss to methane. This investigation builds on previous attempts at modeling methanogenesis and involves the development of a dynamic mechanistic model of wholerumen function. The model incorporates modifications to certain ruminal fermentation parameters and the addition of a postruminal digestive element. Regression analysis showed good agreement between observed and predicted results for experimental data taken from the literature (r² = 0.76, root mean square prediction error = 15.4%). Evaluation …