Solar Foods estimates their process is 20,000 times more land-efficient than farming. Lab-grown beef also looks at least ten times more efficient on land, energy, and water, according to the book Clean Meat.
So if it doesn't take too long before this stuff takes over the market, we could grow our three billion acres of trees on existing arable land and skip most of the desalination.
It might seem impossible for agriculture do disappear all that quickly, but whale oil was the fifth-largest industry in the U.S., then kerosene came along and wiped it out in a couple decades. And according to studies, people overwhelmingly eat what's cheap and tastes good; if lab-grown foods can manage to taste good and leverage their low resource use into low prices, things could change very quickly.
It's looking increasingly likely that lab-grown food will make a lot of that farming obsolete: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/lab-gr...
Solar Foods estimates their process is 20,000 times more land-efficient than farming. Lab-grown beef also looks at least ten times more efficient on land, energy, and water, according to the book Clean Meat.
So if it doesn't take too long before this stuff takes over the market, we could grow our three billion acres of trees on existing arable land and skip most of the desalination.
It might seem impossible for agriculture do disappear all that quickly, but whale oil was the fifth-largest industry in the U.S., then kerosene came along and wiped it out in a couple decades. And according to studies, people overwhelmingly eat what's cheap and tastes good; if lab-grown foods can manage to taste good and leverage their low resource use into low prices, things could change very quickly.