Rethinking Food And Agriculture In 2019
A Meat and Dairy Industries Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM Owen Rogers, Faunalytics.org
December 2019

RethinkX offers up a report that delves into precision fermentation, and its potential for thoroughly disrupting agriculture in the next decade.

Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash 

This paper, by independent business-disruption think tank RethinkX, focuses on the future of animal agriculture and the technological advancements that promise (and threaten) to revolutionize the industry. It covers technology that will become prominent in the next decades, possible timelines for widespread adoption of that technology, and the effects of these changes on humans, animals, the economy, and the environment.

The main development that the paper looks at is called precision fermentation (PF), which allows scientists to program microorganisms to create virtually any complex organic molecule, including fats, proteins, and vitamins. It’s already used today to produce many food additives, such as the enzymes required for rennet in cheese, the heme used in the Impossible Burger, and raspberry aroma.

This process used to be prohibitively expensive, with a $1M per kg (of a single molecule) price tag in 2000. Today, that price is only $100/kg, and this paper predicts it will fall to below $10/kg by 2025.

By 2030, they predict that the cost of producing food through PF will be less than the cost of producing through current methods, and will therefore lead to a collapse of many traditional agricultural sectors like meat and dairy.

Read the entire article at Rethinking Food And Agriculture In 2019.

---

Return to The Meat and Dairy Industries