People need to directly interact with each cow at different times. Bio reactors however aren’t inherently limited to the size of cows and the 770lb version mentioned provides about 75% more meat than the average cow (440lb meat + skin, bones, etc)

But even that’s really just the first attempt, breweries are a reasonable comparison long term and batch sizes get huge.

>Commercial breweries are a reasonable comparison

You might enjoy the Humbird report: https://engrxiv.org/795su

Muscle cells can't tolerate shear forces yeast can, are much more easily poisoned by their own wastes, have a doubling time 12+ times slower, require sterile pharmaceutical-grade amino acids as a feed stock (which themselves cost $100+/kg), etc etc.

Humbird says commercial cell culture bioreactors don't get any bigger than 25 m^3, and have to be run in a clean room. Doesn't sound much like any brewery I've seen.

With plenty of investment you might get 2x better on any one of those metrics, but in order to compete with cows you have to be 100-1000x better on every single one.

They frequently refer to the bioreactors as fermenters because they are mechanically quite similar which was my point. Also that 25m3 is in comparison to 200-1000m3 vessels used commercially. They also note sufficiently sterilizing a 200m3 vessel is viable, but due to various assumptions about cells used reach 25m3. However their analysis is frequently referring to mammalian cells while chicken is a commonly consumed meat source.

They address one of your criticisms right at the beginning: “The replacement of amino acid media with plant protein hydrolysates is discussed and requires further study.”

It’s a solid analysis in the short term, but optimizing cell lines can significantly change some of these numbers.

you can't leave cows unattended. they wander off, get injured, fall ill, might be stolen, and all kinds of things. if they don't eat well enough they might not be worth slaughtering. you can either keep them in cages and attend to them there, with all the distasteful complications that brings, or herd them in large pastures at the cost of very difficult and dangerous skilled labor.

it will certainly require some training to attend to a bioreactor but assuming an eventual working model they seem much less problematic than a wandering animal, and would probably suffer less and get sick less than lots of caged animals.

This is wrong. Cattle farming is not a labor intensive industry which is why high wage first world countries like USA, Australia, France, Germany are among the top producers and western countries export to places like Indonesia and China competitively with Brazil and India other big beef exporters with lower cost of labor.

> you can't leave cows unattended.

Of course you can. There are remote areas that essentially let cattle roam freely over thousands and thousands of acres and bring them in as little as once a year for maintenance (branding, medication, castration, selling, etc). No fences, no roads, rarely ever being seen aside from routine checks of water points (which is becoming less common with remote monitoring equipment).

> they wander off, get injured, fall ill, might be stolen, and all kinds of things. if they don't eat well enough they might not be worth slaughtering.

> you can either keep them in cages and attend to them there, with all the distasteful complications that brings, or herd them in large pastures at the cost of very difficult and dangerous skilled labor.

There is not much dangerous skilled labor at all. Difficult, yes like a lot of manual labor. Dangerous and skilled no outside of some rare cases like the use of helicopters to drive cattle in aforementioned remote areas with terrain sometimes not even accessible to motorbike so helicopter and horse is used. Importantly even in those situations, the amount of labor required per value of beef produced is simply not very high.

And those aren't really the options. Feedlots are increasingly used (what distasteful complications?) but most of the world's beef is not produced that way, and where those are used it is often as a finishing step after a free-range life to improve consistency and make up the last bit of weight.

you have absolutely zero understanding of the nature of raising beef cattle. Which, for many subsets of cattle rearing, can basically be left to their own devices. From where I sit currently I can see our 150 head comfortably munch their way through oats and pasture into which they were introduced4 months ago, and where they will stay for at least another 4 months, with minimal human intervention until the next calving season comes.

There is very little that is difficult and dangerous about the labour required to herd cattle a couple of times a year, unless you are talking about the gyrocopter cowboys in far north queensland and the Northern Territory, of whom a better description would be crazy or insane

Feedlotting is more labour intensive, but then the beef is more expensive because in some markets it is considered of a higher grade, and they may weigh more