How humanity feeds itself has created challenges ranging from its contribution to climate change to weaknesses that were exposed by COVID-19 such as fragile just-in-time supply chains.

To address these challenges, there are three promising technologies — vertical, cellular and precision agriculture — that can remake the relationship to land and food.

Innovators have been growing crops indoors since Roman times. What is new is the efficiency of LED lighting and advanced robotics that allow vertical farms today to produce 20 times more food on the same footprint as is possible in the field.

Most vertical farms only produce greens, such as lettuce, herbs and microgreens, because they are quick and profitable, but within five years many more crops will be possible as the cost of lighting continues to fall and technology develops.

The controlled environments of vertical farms slash pesticide and herbicide use, can be carbon neutral and they recycle water.

Cellular agriculture, or the science of producing animal products without animals, heralds even bigger change. In 2020 alone, hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into the sector, and in the past few months, the first products have come to market.

Precision agriculture is another big frontier. Soon self-driving tractors will use data to plant the right seed in the right place, and give each plant exactly the right amount of fertilizer, cutting down on energy, pollution and waste.

Taken together, vertical, cellular and precision farming should allow us the ability to produce more food on less land and with fewer inputs. Ideally, we will be able to produce any crop, anywhere, any time of year.

Of course, these technologies are no panacea. No technology ever is. For one thing, while these technologies are maturing rapidly, they aren’t quite ready for mainstream deployment. Many remain too expensive for small- and medium-sized farms and may drive farm consolidation.

Some consumers and food theorists are cautious, wondering why we can’t produce our food the way our great-grandparents did. Critics of these agricultural technologies call for agri-ecological or regenerative farming that achieves sustainability through diversified, small-scale farms that feed local consumers. Regenerative agriculture is promising, but it isn’t clear it will scale.

While these are serious considerations, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach to food security. For instance, alternative small-scale mixed-crop farms also suffer labour shortages and typically produce expensive food that is beyond the means of lower-income consumers.

But it doesn’t have to be an either/or situation. There are benefits and drawbacks to all approaches and we cannot achieve our climate and food security goals without also embracing agricultural technology.

By taking the best aspects of alternative agriculture (namely the commitment to sustainability and nutrition), the best aspects of conventional agriculture (the economic efficiency and the ability to scale) and novel technologies such as those described above, the world can embark on an agricultural revolution that — when combined with progressive policies around labour, nutrition, animal welfare and the environment — will produce abundant food while reducing agriculture’s footprint on the planet.

-This is an abridged version of an article that first appeared in the Conversation and is reposted under Creative Commons.

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In a news release today, Israeli startup Remilk, which uses the tagline “Real Dairy. No Milk,” announced it had received a ‘No Objection Letter’ from Health Canada. This will “open the door for use of Remilk’s protein in a variety of products with the same taste and texture as milk, ice cream, yogurt, cream cheese, and more,” the company said.

According to Remilk’s website, its products are developed using copies of the gene responsible for production of milk protein in cows. The gene is inserted into yeast, and fermented “where it multiplies rapidly and produces real milk proteins, identical to those that cows produce.”

The proteins are combined with vitamins, minerals, and “non-animal” fats and sugars, which produces products free from cholesterol or lactose, the company said.

This lets “consumers to enjoy the taste of the dairy they love, without dairy’s environmental and health-related drawbacks,” said Remilk co-founder and CEO Aviv Wolff in today’s news release.

Canada joins the U.S., Israel and Singapore in giving Remilk the go-ahead.

“Canada is an important market for us,” Wolff said. “We are proud to be the first to enter with an opportunity to deliver an unparalleled dairy experience for Canadians.”

While Remilk claims to be the first of its kind to get Health Canada’s approval, it’s one of several around the world.

For instance the Perfect Day company, which sells to the American market, was founded in 2014 and got U.S. regulatory clearance in 2019. Its products are made via an enzyme-producing fungus developed to produce specific proteins, Perfect Day’s website says.

However, “the synthetic milk industry must grow exponentially before it becomes a sizable threat to animal-based dairy,” wrote researcher Milena Bojovic in a 2022 article published in The Conversation.

Significant capital and investment in research and development, along with new manufacturing infrastructure like fermentation tanks, will be needed, she wrote.

Conventional dairy production isn’t going away any time soon, Bojovic wrote, however she suggested the sector should realize it’s “on the cusp of pivotal change” and should maximize its social benefits while minimizing its environmental drawbacks. 

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But it should have. Biomanufacturing is about harnessing nature’s factories – cells – to make just about anything. That includes food. As Biden pointed out, biomanufacturing could boost food security.

How? By cultivating meat. Having a roast for dinner has traditionally required rearing animals, slaughtering them, and discarding inedible parts. But technology has advanced to the point we can now grow animal muscle cells in bioreactors.

Cultivated meat has come a long way, but it’s still not cost-competitive with traditional meat. The last hurdle to be overcome is scale.

To create a new farm, you have to remove most of what was there before – forests, grasslands, wetlands. Cows, sheep, chickens and pigs are hungry, so the demand for soybeans and other feed shoots up. And cows belch out methane from the fermenting grass in their stomachs. Animal agriculture contributes nearly 15 per cent of the world’s emissions – and cows make up the largest share of that.

While growing and eating plants directly is still the most calorie efficient way to produce food, many people who have grown up eating meat are unlikely to switch to fully vegetarian diets. The taste and texture of animal muscle and fat tissue just can’t be fully replicated by plant proteins and oils.

Cattle are more sensitive to temperatures than humans, especially to heat. They can’t get rid of as much heat by sweating. They prefer temperatures below 20 C. During heatwaves, they can suffer heat stress, which can lead to organ failure and death.

Cultivated meat is done indoors in temperature-controlled areas. It also allows us to farm vertically, creating a smaller footprint. Beef produced this way requires vastly less land (95 per cent less) and with a fraction of the greenhouse gases (92 per cent less) than traditional beef production, according to a life cycle analysis.

There’s also much less waste. If you want to be able to cook and eat chicken breast and thighs, why not just grow those parts rather than breeding and raising a chicken, complete with digestive tract, brain and feathers?

Biopsied muscle cells from chickens can be grown inside bioreactors, sterile stainless-steel tanks. Another bonus is you don’t need to rely on antibiotics.

Importantly, these muscle and fat cells floating in a broth of plant-based nutrients (called culture medium) promise to be much better at converting food into muscle mass. For every three calories of broth, we could get one calorie of meat in return.

Chickens convert food to meat at an 8:1 ratio. But cows need much more. For every approximately 30 calories of feed a cow eats, we get one calorie of food in return.

Their ceaseless demand for food is the main driver of the destruction of tropical forests. Two-fifths of all tropical deforestation is to make more pastures for cows, with 18 per cent of this deforestation done to plant oilseeds like soybeans, most of which become cattle food.

In 2013, the world saw the first ever burger made from cultivated meat. It cost C$467,000. Investment poured in and the cost plunged. By 2017, advocates were predicting cost parity with traditional meat within five years.

It’s 2023, so where is it? While some products are getting closer, they’re still not cheaper than traditional meat. Skeptics argue the technological barriers are insurmountable.

There’s some merit to this critique. Scale is the hardest step for any new technology. Many cultivated meat companies have succeeded in the laboratory, but none have gone all the way to commercial scale.

There are still issues to iron out, such as ensuring bioreactors stay sterile at large scales, and navigating food regulations. Last year’s economic turbulence has also seen private investment drop, though public investment has risen.

Small, high-tech countries like Singapore and Israel are leaders in this area. Both nations are acutely aware of their climate vulnerabilities and dependence on food imports.

Singapore imports 90 per cent of its food, for instance. This is why they’re looking at cultivated meat as well as other alternative proteins. Two years ago, Singapore became the first place in the world where you can actually buy cultivated meat.

This didn’t just happen. It invested in talent, streamlined regulations and actively set out to attract companies.

Growing cells in culture has been done for decades in biomedical research. What’s new is applying this biotech knowledge to food.

Is it a threat to farmers? Not necessarily. Diversifying into new protein markets – as U.S. beef giants like Cargill are doing – could help farmers and agribusinesses stay competitive.

We’ll need a combination of private and public investment to overcome the remaining technical and financial barriers to scale.

As we face an increasingly uncertain future, it might be a smart move to secure our food supply while protecting ourselves against climate change and reducing environmental damage.

– Bianca Le is a cell biologist and Honorary Fellow in Agriculture and Food at the University of Melbourne.

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In the United States, Perfect Day is using genetically modified fungi to produce milk protein for ice cream at a commercial scale. And pre-commercial companies, like TurtleTree and Better Milk, are engineering mammary cells to produce human and cow milk in laboratories — though these remain in the early stages of development.

It might be some time before mammal-less dairy arrives in Canadian grocery stores. But these emerging technologies are part of the fourth agricultural revolution that aims to improve food security, sustainability and agricultural working conditions. With these changes on the horizon, should the dairy sector be worried?

As researchers, we study food systems in transition. We’re especially interested in the impacts cellular agriculture might have on the dairy system.

Animal agriculture plays a big role in the global food system. The Food and Agriculture Organization states that animal agriculture provides roughly a third of global food protein, supports the livelihoods of over a billion people and contributes to soil fertility.

But animal agriculture is facing increased scrutiny, especially around environmental impacts and animal welfare issues.

Animal agriculture is also vulnerable to extreme environmental conditions and climate change. Recent flooding in B.C. killed well over half a million farm animals and threatened to contaminate the sensitive freshwater ecosystems of the Fraser Valley with stored manure and agricultural chemicals. And it’s a known risk factor for zoonotic diseases and pandemics, such as H1N1 or the swine flu.

One way to reduce the risks introduced by animal agriculture is to remove — or nearly remove — livestock from the food production equation. Cellular agriculture uses cell cultures to produce animal products without raising livestock, hunting or fishing. While still in its early phases, this technology could help meet growing demand for animal protein, reduce environmental impacts and address animal welfare concerns.

Cellular agriculture makes biologically equivalent or near-equivalent foods to those produced with animals. This is different from plant-based meat and dairy alternatives, such as Beyond Burgers and oat milk, which use plant ingredients that approximate their non-vegetarian counterparts.

One approach is to use advanced fermentation, where yeasts, fungi and bacteria are genetically modified to produce proteins. The approach is similar to brewing beer, but with highly specialized micro-organisms that follow instructions that have been added to their genetic code.

You may already be eating products created using this technology. Thirty years ago, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the use of a bioengineered form of rennet enzymes, which is widely used in cheese making and replaces the original enzymes which were harvested from calf stomachs.

Today, vats of micro-organisms, genetically modified to carry the appropriate calf gene, supply rennet for about 70 per cent of cheese made in the U.S. It’s functionally identical to the original cheese-making enzymes, but it’s easier, less costly to produce and doesn’t rely on mammals.

Another approach, called tissue engineering, uses cells collected from an animal to grow meat, fish or even leather in a controlled environment. The tissues grow, but in a nutrient-rich broth called growth media in bioreactor tanks.

Examples include GOOD Meat’s cellular chicken nuggets, the first commercially available cellular meat product, and WildType’s cellular salmon, which is being grown in stainless steel tanks in San Francisco.

Dairy is an important food commodity in Canada. Over 18,000 farm operators are employed at the roughly 10,000 dairy farms across the country, which together produced 9.5 billion litres of milk and earned farms over $7 billion in 2020.

To meet consumer demand and guarantee a fair price to the farmers, the Canadian supply management system controls dairy production volumes and the number of producers at the provincial level using a quota system. Farmers essentially buy the right to sell dairy products. Dairy farms are capital intensive and farmers often carry large debt loads, making it a difficult industry to enter.

Livestock farmers in B.C. had an exceptionally challenging 2021. After a summer of encroaching forest fires and a record-breaking heat dome, the year ended with catastrophic floods followed by extreme cold. Fraser Valley farmers were forced to dump 7.5 million litres of raw milk in November when shipping routes were destroyed by flooding, which also killed 428 dairy cows.

Across the country, dairy farmers also dumped milk early in the pandemic — more than 30 million litres in the year ending July 31, 2020, according to one analysis — when demand plummeted due to restaurant closures and other system shocks.

We see animal-free dairy as possibly having some environmental and food security benefits, but with some trade-offs.

If cellular agriculture competes with conventional dairy in Canada, what would the impact be on dairy farmers? What would happen to the cows? To the farms? To the supply management system in general?

Addressing these questions is critical for developing policy that enables transitions to food systems with lower environmental and carbon footprints while ensuring harms and benefits are distributed equitably — what’s known as the just transition.

Much of our understanding of these just transitions comes from the energy sector. Canada recently developed a just transition task force to look for ways to reduce the livelihood disruptions that come with phasing out coal. The federal government has also recently initiated consultations for just transition legislation that would direct resources to communities negatively impacted by the transition.

Just transition policies for cellular agriculture could encourage farmers to transition into animal-free dairy production among other changes.

It’s unclear how soon Canadian dairy farmers will face competition from cellular agriculture, although some have suggested U.S. beef and dairy sector revenues will decline nearly 90 per cent by 2035.

Is it reasonable to expect Canadian dairy farmers will make way for cellular dairy? Or is up to policy-makers, industry leaders and food systems organizers to ensure this transition leads to a food system that is more sustainable, but also just?

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