Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet (2019)

There are lots of issues with farming animals for meat and carbon output but most can be mitigated. The pathways are reduction of cattle in favour of sheep and goats, changing the gut biome of livestock and removing inefficient breeding stock so the farmers produce the same output with fewer animals. Genetic solutions are available now to address the last two.

Factory meat will augment our supply of protein but they won't scale. The farmland used for livestock is mostly useless for the plant matter needed by the meat factories and the factories themselves are hardly going to be carbon neutral when you add in fertiliser and fuel for all that extra harvesting.

I wouldn't be too keen on eating an extruded factory carrot, not sure I personally want to replace another natural product in my diet with some chemical mess. I am not alone on that.

Full disclosure: my company makes a product that can be used to reduce carbon output of livestock farming.

Some 'vegan' beef jerky being the most acceptable, but not really true to the expectation either. Could have done wine gums with chili instead, for the same effect.

edit: btw. what you percieve as 'soon' I perceive as drops in an ocean of inertia. This all reads like hype. Why there isn't more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn or any other Ersatz out there? That stuff exists like decades, and before the vegan hype was usually shunned because perceived as fake. I don't really care, may you all grow tits and enjoy futa because trendy. Yay! (Phytoestrogens, get it?)

* We already observed a techno "Green Revolution" in our recent past. Norman Borlaug, starting in the '60s and '70s. Directly maps to wild unprecedented population growth rates and population levels. 12 years to add 1 billion mouths to feed, 4 billions in a row.

* There are fluctuations in the growth rate over time and space, but this has less impact than our intuition usually grants because we don't intuit exponential processes well. Low growth rate populations are quickly (in historical terms) taken over by high growth rates populations. It's the very logic of biology: the eternal race between exponential growth and entropic decay is won by the populations with highest growth rate * entropy resilience. We can observe it with out fail in a Petri dish. We can also observe this all over the industrialized world, with the (temporary?) exception of insular nations like Japan and South Korea. The Amish will inherit the world.

* Adapting to the industrialized world may have temporarily created the illusion that the carrying capacity is much smaller than it actually is. People started to think that they need 5000 kWh / capita / year instead of the traditional 50 kWh. In the long run, as populations bulge, people will come to terms with reality and accept, out of necessity, much lower per capita energy consumption. In socioeconomic terms, more and more people will get used to "poverty". Techno-optimist socioeconomic palliatives like UBI will, inadvertently but likely, accelerate this process.

Edit. A few words about "poverty", seen as low per capita energy requirements. There are worlds of difference between:

* 2000 BC. Running for food in the big plains / forests.

* 1000 AD. Working the fields in a medieval setting.

* 1950 AD. Living packed in small pockets of industrial high rises.

* 2200 AD (?). Living in a world-wide sprawl of high rises.

* 2700 AD (?). Living in a world-wide artificial dome, Trantor style.

Perhaps the limiting factor will turn out to be that our mammal brains break down before the nigthmare landscape that our ever more efficient techno world will eventually produce.

When you catch them they just don't look happy. :-/