25-10 - Flipbook - Page 65
October 2025
rope we have seen a 20% reduction in beef and lamb and a 20% increase in poultry
and pork since 2000, sparing around 20 million hectares (49 million acres - around one
Spain) of land.
This swap raises ethical concerns, as we need to kill many more chickens to get the
same quantity of meat as we do from cows. Nevertheless, it seems likely that people will
continue to swap towards lower cost, and generally lower land use, animal products.
Lab-grown foods
Another, albeit less certain, way land use for farming could drop in the coming decades is a rise in the use of synthetic and lab-grown foods.
While several landless substitutes for crops have become mainstream, such as synthetic
vanilla flavour and synthetic fibres, many more have been developed and tested. Synthetic substitutes for oils and fats, for example, have existed since the 1940s, when margarine was first synthesised from fossil fuels in wartime Germany. We have eaten and
drunk the products of small-scale microbial fermentation for millennia (such as yoghurt
and beer) but modern bulk fermentation could be transformative, particularly if it uses
feedstocks which don't require land (such as waste
streams, by-products, or
through the direct use of elemental nitrogen, oxygen, and
hydrogen). We also have labproduced substitutes for coffee and cocoa. While they
currently use sugars as the
feedstock, these can be
much less land demanding
than when conventionally
produced.
External forces would likely be
needed to increase the
adoption of these, such as
price shocks (which are more
likely due to climate
change), changing trade
policies, or increasing concern about the deforestation caused by oils, coffee and cocoa.
The adoption of lab-grown or synthetic substitutes in animal feed is also likely. Pasture
use and crops grown to feed animals make up around 80% of the world's
farmland, so substituting these feeds would have transformative effects. The
major challenge is cost, however. Bacterially derived lab-grown animal
feeds have been successfully tested but are still prohibitively expensive. We
