Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di...
by thatcat on Thursday September 23, 2021 @07:27AM
(#28627735)
Regenerative agriculture uses livestock to increase viability of soil. If used correctly theyre already a sustainable ag tool that uses waste and grazing as a benefit to plant production and carbon sequestration, not just a meat generation source. Lab meat will become less efficient at high scale not more efficient according to the history of previous biotech scale up attempts, most of which use more viable organisms than animal cell culture.
Factory farms are also currently benefitting from economies of scale, something that plant-based meat manufacturers are only now catching up to. Plant-based meat's ingredients are generally pretty cheap compared to the cost of raising livestock, so theoretically they could potentially beat the cost of meat.
My non-expert hunch is that its externalities of lab-grown meat will be somewhat different from factory farms. Time will tell if they're better, more sustainable trade-offs.