All Brawn, No Brain
Why Technology Will Change Everything About How We Feed Ourselves
This is part 1 of a 2-part series on the future of agriculture. Part 2 can be found here: Growing Up, Not Out.
Let’s think of all the major problems facing our modern agricultural system today: The food we produce occupies half of our habitable land, accounts for 70% of freshwater use, and is responsible for a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions. To do this, we use millions of tons of herbicides, pesticides, and insecticides each year, all of which come with known health risks to both humans and the wider environment, to say nothing about the crisis of resistant weeds and pests rapidly adapting to said chemicals which, in turn, requires us to use more chemicals, and so on. Our current practices such as tilling and nutrient depletion are causing the degradation of our topsoil—as happened in the 1930s which played a key role in exacerbating the severity of the notorious Dust Bowl—and agricultural expansion is by far the leading cause of deforestation, with three of every four trees lost primarily relating to either cattle, oilseeds, or crops.
Even our fertilizer has major problems. Fertilizer runoff causes water pollution and promotes the growth of massive algal blooms that suck the oxygen out of water, creating oceanic dead zones. The fertilizer we use is also outright hazardous. It sounds crazy, but the key ingredient for modern fertilizer, ammonium nitrate, is extremely explosive under certain conditions. If you remember the catastrophic 2020 Beirut, Lebanon explosion, then you have seen just how dangerous fertilizer can be. Thousands have died from ammonium nitrate explosions over the past hundred years, though this figure is small compared to the estimated 3-3.5 billion lives which synthetic fertilizer has made possible to support. Nonetheless its use creates major challenges when handling, transporting, storing, and utilizing the chemical.
Image Credit: The Telegraph, 2,750 tons of chemicals detonated in Beirut blast
Our modern food system has massively improved our access to calories, and today even the poorest nations in the world have more food than the richest from a few hundred years ago. Despite this, many around the world live in urban food deserts where people have enough calories available but are lacking fresh, nutritious food—a problem that can partially be traced to the fact that food is still produced far away from the urban centers where it is being consumed, causing it to spoil in transportation. Developing countries are hit hardest, where as much as 30-40% of food can go bad before reaching markets.
Regardless of the ones already mentioned, there are even more obvious vulnerabilities to our globalized food system. While globalization has allowed for a level of prosperity and trade at levels previously unimagined, major concerns exist over the global food trades that are reliant on just a handful of nations (such as the United States, Netherlands, Ukraine, Brazil, and Russia), as any precarious event in national security (i.e. Ukraine) or climatic changes can drastically alter the amount of food available to the global population. It is truly fascinating that in a world where we can go to space, instantly communicate with those on the other side of the planet, and alter the very climate of the planet, our food is still so utterly vulnerable.
However, the precarity of food need not be prolonged. A new era of agriculture is dawning on humanity, the likes of which will dramatically change not only our very conception of what agriculture looks like, but perhaps what food even is. The conglomeration of our rapidly developing advanced technologies (such as AI, robotics, genetic engineering, efficient appliances & lighting, cheap and ubiquitous energy, and a communicative Internet of Things) have opened up doors for our agricultural system that were previously unimaginable. This new era of agriculture will allow us to not only completely eliminate problems associated with the modern food system, but it will open up doors to levels of prosperity previously unimaginable. Strap in and get hungry, because everything you understand about food is about to be turned on its head.
There have been two previous agricultural revolutions. The first is what everyone knows as “The Agricultural Revolution,” where around 10,000 years ago humans transitioned from gatherer-hunter1 societies to a relatively more sedentary lifestyle that involved planting crops in a singular area, a simple idea that would forever change the trajectory of our species. The second and much more recent, “Green Revolution” was that of the mid to late 20th century. This revolution took what we had learned over the prior 10,000 years and applied our newfound knowledge of science, technology, and engineering. Genetically engineered crops, industrialized fertilizer, a globalized food system, and the industrialization of meat and crop production, bolstered by pesticide and herbicide use, allowed us to raise far more crops and animal products for much cheaper and with less space. Because of these advancements, global average rice yields (in tonnes per hectare) rose 250% between just 1960 and 2020, corn (maize) by 300%, and wheat by 350%.
While we should all praise the fact that this massive transition—and those like Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug who helped bring it about—saved millions of human lives, the other impacts noted earlier cannot be forgotten. If we are to truly create a more sustainable and prosperous future, then the next revolution must maintain and improve upon all of this progress while eliminating the negative externalities.
In the next article of this two-part series, we will continue to discuss some of these changes, in addition to why the way that we get our energy will be crucially important to a modern agricultural system. But first, I want to spend the rest of this first article discussing the future of meat—that substance which we know is bad for so many reasons yet can’t stop ordering at restaurants—and what is undoubtedly the most mind-boggling agricultural invention coming down the pipeline: lab-grown meat.
Last month the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the sale of “lab grown meat” (also called “cell-based,” “cultivated,” “cultured,” or “slaughter-free” meat) in the country, becoming the second in the world to allow such a product. What makes this so important is that cultured meat is a developing process which arrives at the same result as our current system (a steak, chicken breast, or any other type of select meat product), but without the rest of the animal. I know how crazy and confusing this may sound, but stay with me.
Animal cells (in this case, those that are muscle), whether they be chicken or cow, do not need the host organism to grow. The brain controls the growth of the body, of course, but it also has to deal with thousands of competing tasks that all require energy, in addition to dealing with the external world. Left to its own, there is no reason that the cells which make up, say, a chicken thigh, need the rest of the animal to grow, as long as the cells get the proper environment (temperature & pressure) and resources (nutrients & water). Given these conditions, which are provided inside of steel vessels which regulate all of the relevant factors called “bioreactors,” we can grow meat, without the need for the rest of the animal (hence the “slaughter-free” title). While this process does require some initial live cells which can only replicate a limited number of times, a single biopsy could provide “hundreds of thousands of kilograms of meat,” dramatically reducing the need for livestock. This itself can also potentially be improved upon even further through alternative processes which may allow for a single cell line to be used indefinitely, which would come with obvious benefits.
I cannot emphasize this enough: cultured meat is real meat, in every sense of the word. It is not plant-based, it is not a replica. Biologically, it is indistinguishable from the burgers, chicken nuggets, and fillet-o-fishes that you are used to eating.
Cultured meat has the potential to solve every major problem with our current meat system. More research is required to investigate the impacts of the technology, but a 2011 Oxford study found that “Cultured meat could potentially be produced with up to 96% lower greenhouse gas emissions, 45% less energy, 99% lower land use, and 96% lower water use than conventional meat.” Alternatively, a more recent University of California, Davis study, (yet to be peer-reviewed) noted that due to the lack of economies of scale and a remaining reliance on highly specialized growth media, “Our findings suggest that cultured meat [in its current state] is not inherently better for the environment than conventional beef.” but that “It’s possible we could reduce its environmental impact in the future, but it will require significant technical advancement to simultaneously increase the performance and decrease the cost of the cell culture media.”
Advancements are needed, but they are also coming fast. Assuming the technology will continue to develop, expectations are high that cultured meat will require far less water and land, while producing significantly fewer greenhouse gas emissions. Meat production requires far more land and water, and livestock alone are responsible for approximately 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions due to deforestation and methane emissions—a problem which cultured meat would almost entirely circumvent. Costs are also falling fast: In 2013 one company’s first cultured burger cost $325,000, but now the cost has fallen to just $11.36.
Perhaps most important of all, however, is the moral argument. The modern industrialized factory farming system is cruel and inhumane, with billions of animals (many of them, such as pigs, being very intelligent) raised in small prison cells and force fed until being slaughtered at the prime of their life. I’m not vegan or vegetarian by any stretch of the imagination, but it is simply impossible to ignore the ethical monstrosity that we have created. Soon, hopefully, we will be able to provide ourselves with all of the meat our carnivorous hearts could ever desire, without the ethical issues of the modern system that has already made so many turn away from meat. Soon, hopefully, we will rid ourselves of a process so horrific that our descendants may look down upon us in the same way we look down on the history of slavery. To many, including myself, cultured meat is an ethical issue, because without it we prolong an archaic culture of suffering.
Not only does cultured meat eliminate all these problems, but it is a fundamentally better product. Because there is no reliance on factory farming, the meat itself is much safer and comes without the disease outbreaks we have become so used to, which undermine the security of the current system, causes highly unstable prices for food products, and risks highly dangerous pathogen spillovers. Going even further, because cultured meat will be grown in sterile conditions, the classic diseases such as Salmonella (which alone sickens over 1.3 million Americans each year) and E. coli would be totally absent. Imagine that, raw chicken would be safe to eat! Beyond disease, cultured meat can be grown with complete control over the nutrients that are fed into the product. This means that the end product can be tailored to fit a certain profile, favoring some vitamins or healthy fats, with presumably dozens of different brands or niches.
There’s no getting around it, cultured meat freaks people out. I think the reason is probably the same why nuclear energy and GMO crops also scare many of us, despite there being no evidence that either is dangerous—they make us feel like we are playing God. But how you feel about something only goes so far as an excuse to ignore it.
Cultured meat will probably be one of the craziest shifts that many of us will experience in our lifetimes. It will improve the outlook of meat in a multitude of ways, all while making it safer, more accessible, and (hopefully) cheaper. But it is far from the only change happening in agriculture. There are many upcoming technologies that are less puzzling than growing a sirloin, but that still have the potential to make an even bigger difference, each of which helps to address the problems highlighted at the start of this article while increasing everyone’s prosperity. The next article in this series will further discuss these other developments, and address how energy generation will be even more important to our food’s future than ever before.
The term “gatherer-hunter” is intentionally used here as opposed to the typical “hunter-gatherer.” Recent studies have found that pre-agricultural humans likely relied more heavily on the gathering of calories than the hunting of them, meaning that our current lingo is backwards, as the primary emphasis should be placed on the “gathering” as opposed to the “hunting.”