The herbivores are key component of sustainable agriculture, you can't do it without them. Lab grown meat is an interesting, energy intensive step in the wrong direction.
I think we can all agree that there are problems with factory farming, and grain finishing livestock.
If the intent is actual sustainability, then they have to be given their full 20 years to live. The cattle themselves act as carbon sinks too and have to be part of the whole ecosystem, not only exposed to one part of it. If you're constantly slaughtering them and replacing them, it's not doing much. It just sounds nice.
>it costs a bit more
"A bit" is an understatement.
>The herbivores are key component of sustainable agriculture, you can't do it without them.
You can't. But you have to do it without eating the vast majority of them.
The Myth of Regenerative Ranching:
>[...]
>If regenerative agriculture were to challenge the mainstream food system, it would run into some hard physical limits. Converting the beef industry, at current levels of demand, entirely to a grass- and crop-forage feeding system would require increasing the total size of American beef herds by 23 million cows, or 30 percent, according to a recent article in the respected science journal Environmental Research Letters. And that increase, were it even possible, would have monumental consequences for both greenhouse gas outputs and land use. But there simply isn’t enough land in the U.S. for that many grazers. At best, beef production would have to decrease by 39 percent and potentially as much as 73 percent. Framed that way, grass-fed grazing, especially if scaled, doesn’t seem likely to regenerate many ecosystems—indeed, it would likely require deforestation, as is the case in Brazil, where the clear-cutting of the Amazon is driven both by soy plantations for feedlot and factory farm animal feed and by the need for grazing space for grass-fed cattle. And as the Environmental Research Letters article argued, even temporary overgrazing can lead to long-term and perhaps irreversible ecological degradation.
>[...]
>Actually making animal agriculture less ecologically disruptive would mean taking animals’ ecological value as a bedrock principle against and over their value as commodities. That means treating commodity production, not land, as “marginal”: Commodities could be extracted only if doing so didn’t disturb the ecological, social, and cultural value of the landscape. In other words, in most such systems, animals would more than likely play a minor support role for primarily plant agriculture. And that, in turn, would almost certainly mean far fewer grazers entering the commercial food system, and at a much higher price point. Point Reyes, for example, might feature free-ranging elk managed by an Indigenous best practice–driven conservation agency, not dairy cattle grazed by private ranches. This kind of truly eco-friendly meat production would produce even less meat than the current grab bag of practices loosely labeled “regenerative.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/163735/myth-regenerative-ran...
1. https://agrilifetoday.tamu.edu/2021/04/29/great-plains-grass...
I'm not entirely convinced by this argument. A lot of the ecological arguments against meat-eating is because cattle grazing requires huge swaths of land. Current practices generate this land via deforestation (I don't have statistics on how much land is generated via deforestation, but we can at least conclude that it's A Thing That Happens^{tm})[^1]. While certainly, grass captures some carbon, I'm going to guess that it's far less than a rainforest ecosystem of the same area, especially since the rainforest isn't being actively consumed. There's also the biodiversity of a forest environment.
[^1]: https://archive.ph/4pRMd <- WP article
Current practices in undeveloped countries. Advanced economies have been reforesting recently.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.FRST.ZS?location...
It’s been proven by Allen Savory and others, you can check his Ted talk here https://youtu.be/vpTHi7O66pI
Even if lab grown meat is the next best thing since sliced bread it would be a complete climate disaster to not continue, and expand, holistic cattle farming.
Lab grown meat is a step in a direction that allows us to not use so much land for livestock.
Let's just say, the large intestine doesn't exactly stay pristine in the process, and I doubt they clean everything like you think they do.
Anyway, snark aside, I'm curious how this goes because while I'm not apologetic for my place on the food chain, carbon emissions from animal farming are problematic and the price that real meat should cost if we raise them humanely is pretty exorbitant. It will be hilarious to see cattle rustling become a capital offense again.
Culturing meat is entirely about minimizing resource and land usage, and curbing the serious environmental impacts of the beef industry, which is of course truly infamous for methane emissions and deforestation.
I'm an agricultural researcher with a background that includes in vitro biology, now getting another degree focused on entire food systems. I have spent a lot of time looking into the economic realities of food innovation, land-use, energy, water, price-sensitivity, and consumer preferences.
There's nothing wrong with getting excited about lab-grown meat, but we have a loooong way to go before considering it as a realistic food source in the future.
One must consider the current price of food is grounded in the use of fossil fuels, ignoring negative externalities, and millennia of optimization.
To consider lab-grown meat as a future replacement of conventional animal production, you have to go way back to primary energy sources and work your way back from there. Chances are, you'll find that a hypothetical future of lab-grown meat is cost-prohibitive for basically the entire world.
I'm not here to argue the ethics, environmental damage, etc. Just pointing out the COST, and why consumer adoption should not be viewed through the lens of a six-figure salary programmer.
Traditional farming and cattle ranching still exists!
[0] https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estima...
[0] https://littlecreekmontana.shop/blogs/ranch-blog/food-for-th...
[0]http://www.fao.org/ag/againfo/home/en/news_archive/2017_More...
[0]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/12/colorado...
Not everything grows particularly well in a given location.
Could is doing a lot of work here, especially because someone might quickly read this as would. This statistic makes it seem like 36% of non-forage inedibles can only be processed by livestock, but there isn't evidence for that.
This is exactly what I mean - the statistic has convinced you of some unwritten law that says that only livestock or humans can eat this stuff. Since humans can't, it has to go to livestock.
But you're completely ignoring that processing these inedibles doesn't have to come in the form of eating them - we can make compost, building materials, packaging. Just because something is doesn't mean it ought to.
Do you know what composts that stuff like crazy, though?
Feeding it to cows.
And even better, it reduces methane and carbon dioxide emissions, because you're turning all that carbon into cows instead of just letting bacteria emit it as gas.
Cows don't work as carbon sinks if you're killing them every 2 years to eat them. You're just reintroducing that carbon in the form of sewage, transportation, and food waste. They need to be allowed to live all 20 years of their lives for the carbon efficiency argument to work. This necessitates (1) massively reducing the population of livestock by ceasing breeding (otherwise it's hurting any gains with carbon storage in the soil) and (2) finding alternative uses for the inedible byproducts of plant agriculture.
Bear in mind that cows do not actually generate carbon - as with humans, they just move it around.
That's why we don't eat grass. Because it doesn't feed us. But it feeds cows.
Pigs used to be fed swill but mad cows disease and foot and mouth put paid to that.