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A comment on Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to displace traditional meat. Parent comment

Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by teachrdan on Wednesday September 22, 2021 @10:18PM (#28624548)
> Cows are actually a way to convert otherwise worthless land into food. And the grass they're eating is not going to typically store carbon otherwise.

I think this is provably false. As mentioned above, a lot of land used for cattle used to be forest; the global beef market is one of the main drivers for deforestation in the Brazilian rainforest.

There are second order effects, too. Cattle that's factory farmed in the developed world is raised on corn, wheat, soy, and other calorie dense foods. Those crops are grown with a large quantity of fertilizer, and for every calorie of corn, wheat, etc. grown, about one calorie of petroleum is used.

I don't think there's any doubt that beef, in particular, is only economical because of the negative externalities involved. Accounting for those externalities would probably go a long way toward making lab grown meat (more) competitive.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/02/revealed...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_feeding#Corn-fed

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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by readams on Wednesday September 22, 2021 @10:42PM (#28624691)
Not sure if you're intentionally trying to misunderstand to make some weird point. All I said is that there exists land that is not forest, and is not otherwise suitable for agriculture, but that can be converted by cows into food. This is not only not provably false, it's actually true.

The fact that a lot of cattle production does not do this is not proof that this is not possible.

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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by pjerem on Thursday September 23, 2021 @12:44AM (#28625283)
You do understand that cows aren’t free energy generators from thin air ?

And as the big bag of calories they are, they need to be raised with huge calories intake, which is not exactly commercial TV ad grass.

So you need to raise food for your cows alongside your cows anyway.

You are just transforming energy from a medium to another and thermodynamics says that it’s totally inefficient.

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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by gambiting on Thursday September 23, 2021 @02:31AM (#28625799)
Uhm......sure, but there absolutely are cows that are raised with very little maintenance on land that is otherwise useless. Here in UK farmers often raise cows on moorlands, which are mostly just a pile of rocks with a bit if soil on top to support minimal vegetation, that land isn't and can't be used for other types of farming - yet farmers happily leave cows on it in the spring and collect them for slaughter in autumn. They feed on what grows there and there's little need to supplement them. Then they are usually slaughtered locally too. I can't believe that this kind of beef farming is even 10% as bad for environment as the big factory farming elsewhere.
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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by pas on Thursday September 23, 2021 @02:49AM (#28625935)
Sure it happens, but like others said, this is so low intensity (small scale), that it's basically an edge case.

We can/could raise mountain goats too.

If all meat were raised only this way the lab grown would be probably cheaper.

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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by maccard on Thursday September 23, 2021 @04:49AM (#28626723)
Have you got any numbers on what percentage of UK beef is reared like that?
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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by thorin on Thursday September 23, 2021 @07:41AM (#28627824)
It's probably reasonably high, anecdotally every time I got out walking in the hills in most parts of the UK there are large numbers of sheep and cattle grazing on basically unusable wilderness, often which is part of a national park so can't be built on much anyway. They seem to be pretty self sufficient eating grass unless there is a heavy snowfall, which is quite rare in England, farmers would then supplement with feed crops like turnips etc.
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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by pigeonhole123 on Thursday September 23, 2021 @02:21AM (#28625722)
Thermodynamics says nothing about which plants can grow on which land. A lot of land in the world can only sustain grass. Letting animals graze on that land is as close to free as you can get
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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by CorrectHorseBat on Thursday September 23, 2021 @02:11AM (#28625660)
Is it possible on the same scale?
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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by judahmeek on Wednesday September 22, 2021 @10:46PM (#28624727)
The real problem is that forest is not being economically valued for its carbon sequestration capability.

Solving that would require complex carbon cap & trade regulations to be enforced.

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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by esyir on Thursday September 23, 2021 @12:37AM (#28625256)
Forests have basically no continuous carbon sequestration capability. Most of the carbon they'll ever sequester is already there.

You'd get more by turning it into a tree farm, converting trees to charcoal and burying that.

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Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di... by circlefavshape on Thursday September 23, 2021 @09:43AM (#28629017)
I don't think you're right here. Forests form soil

https://www.wri.org/insights/forests-absorb-twice-much-carbo...

[ Parent | on HN ]