Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to displace traditional meat

Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by mikeyouse on Wednesday September 22, 2021 @09:30PM (#28624253)

Yeah there's almost no way that's true. Maxmimum bison population in North America was never more than 50 million. US alone has 90M head of cattle, Canada and Mexico have ~10 million each.

Also Bison grew at natural rates and lived for 20+ years... Beef cattle are slaughtered around 2/3 years - so you're turning over ~2,000lbs of mass per head every few years. Just an unfathomably massive industry.

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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by philwelch on Wednesday September 22, 2021 @11:20PM (#28624901)

So that's about twice the population for about 1/10th the lifespan, so about a 20x increase in scale. Which seems...not entirely unreasonable compared to near-complete wilderness supporting a hunter-gatherer population?

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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by mekkkkkk on Thursday September 23, 2021 @06:18AM (#28627303)

You're saying ~1 billion freely roaming bison in the US seems like a manageable and reasonable solution?

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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by philwelch on Thursday September 23, 2021 @11:13AM (#28630337)

No; I’m saying it seems reasonable to get 20x the bovine field from the same land through active ranching and agriculture than it would naturally support.

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