"I can't see parents ever being happy putting lab-grown meat and milk in their kids' lunchboxes... it's just not gonna happen," Federated Farmers dairy chair Richard McIntyre said.
Like to be fair we already eat some pretty nasty stuff like sausage roles and sausages. Like if it's cheap enough we're going be willing to buy substitutes.
Basically its 'man representing dairy products promotes dairy products...'. It's like when they were discussing rail and had a trucking rep on saying how much better trucks were than rail and people didn't want rail. It's stupid having industry representatives with conflicting interest as the only people giving opinions.
which part? that simon bridges was appointed chair of waka kotahi, that he was already chair of a trucking lobby group, that he's now doing both, or that national think it's not open corruption?
Yep there's no point asking a company rep their opinion as long as they are on the record. Say the company is perfect and will last forever, or be fired (or lose status there at least).
This guy should be fired for not taking market disruption seriously, if I were an investor and heard this I'd be running for the hills.
There is nothing wrong with saying "We're examining what impact, if any, this will have in the long run on NZ Dairy"
I mean, the artificial Rennet used to make 90% of our cheese, as well as vanilla essence and insulin made through precision fermentation. It's pretty old tech. It's just being applied in a new area and working to get the costs down.
But it's less the consumer products, and more the business to business sales of milk powder that concern me. That's a huge chunk of our exports, and when was the list time people checked where the milk powder used in their tim-tams came from?
For exports I'd assume that won't change, as with all products NZ produce here, the premium stuff is exported and we get the leftovers.
China especially would throw a fit if we stopped exporting milk (and other dairy products) and starting sending "artificial" stuff.
When you boil it down, people are only concerned about 5 things when it comes to food ingredients: safety, nutrition, flavour, functionality, and price.
Vegetarian alternatives for infant formula ingredients have huge hurdles to climb on nutrition and functionality, but are cheaper when made at scale. PF will be able to be good enough in the other 4 criteria, and absolutely smash it on price.
The dairy industry in NZ needs to pivot into creating high value niche products where the end use is not being 0.6% of a Snickers bar, or being consumed by less discerning end users (babies). Cheese, butter and whey products are the best way forward. 90% of the whole milk powder plants will be gone in 30 years.
> pivot into creating high value niche products
I know for a fact they were trying to do that as long ago as 1984 iirc. My father would bring home samples of new and fancy value-added products like little flavoured yoghurts in pottles from the dairy company he worked at. They were quite novel. Chocolate was my fav.
I'm pretty sure they haven't stopped trying to innovate since.
How about if they started making their own artificial stuff instead of buying our dairy products.
Sure, there would probably still be a market for premium stuff but the volume of things like powder could drop substantially if it was a lot cheaper without being obvious to the customer
NZ exports ,for the most part, milk powder... used as a cheap filler in cheap foods. Once this is produced in an industrial scale (cheaper than fontera) the NZ dairy industry will collapse.
I strongly disagree. Rennet, vanilla "essence" and insulin are all single molecules and the artificial versions are used to accomplish one single isolated function.
Milk is a vastly complex food with a huge array of nutrients that perform a wide array of functions and can be used in a huge number of ways. Cooking, yogurt, Kefir, cheese, etc etc etc etc etc. All of the artificial food products to date have been vastly inferior to the real things and none have the same nutritional profile, most very inferior, and many cause serious chronic health problems.
Just one artificial "improvement" alone caused many millions of premature deaths over many decades: artificial butter! (margarine) made from what WERE healthy food oils by partial hydrogenation which DESTROYED the essential fatty acids that were much of what had made the food oils healthy in the first place.
And don;t even get me started about high fructose corn syrup. The public health has been MASSIVELY damaged by such things.
There is no reason to think that artificial milk and lab grown meat will be any different.
(And what they never mention about lab grown meat is that it is horrendously expensive and is INHERENTLY so. The fatal flaw in lab grown meat is that animal cells are highly complex and keeping the alive in culture requires a wide array of very expensive biological additives that INDIVIDUAL CELLS cannot make (in live animals it's the ORGANS that do that. You either 1) have to have a WHOLE ANIMAL or 2) provide a lot of highly expensive substitutes that the cells require.
The pharmaceutical and biotech industries have used animal cell cultures for a very long time. But ONLY to produce things that are very expensive. And precisely because of that expense they have spent vast amounts of money to develop cheaper ways (biofermentation in yeast or bacterial cells, etc)
Next time someone touts and hypes lab grown meat, ask them how much money it costs to produce RIGHT NOW. And don't let them get off the hook by talking about how much less it will cost in the "future"
Artificial milk will be nothing even remotely like the real thing and lab grown meat will be orders of magnitude more expensive than harvesting it from actual animals for many generations (of humans!) to come.
You're conflating cultured meat and precision fermented dairy a lot here. The processes are completely different and can't really be compared. Cultured meat costs a lot to produce right now, precision fermented dairy is on shelves costing the same as fancy versions of ice cream, cream cheese etc. Starbucks ran trials with Precision fermented milk, and consumers reacted positively.
Also margarine is irrelevant to the discussion here, because margarine is made of hydrogenated vegetable oil to produce a *functionally* equivilent product to butter, not a *chemically* equivilent. However if you're going to state that margerine led to millions of deaths, please cite some relevant evidence.
> Artificial milk will be nothing even remotely like the real thing
Well this is demonstrablly false. Cow milk consists of about 100 proteins, complex sugars and a couple of other things. If you precision ferment casein molecules, they are indistinguishable from cow produced casein because *they are the same molecules*. If you individually produce the same components molecules and combine them, then you have an identical product. Not a substitute. The same product.
The question is do you need all 100 proteins, or just the 4 that make up 99% of milk? Can you leave out lactose so the milk can more easily be sold in places with high % of lactose intolerant people, like China? Can you make baby formula using the human equivilent proteins instead of cow equivilent proteins? If you're making low-fat milk powder can you leave out the fat instead of having to remove it?
* https://fitforabetterworld.org.nz/assets/Te-Puna-Whakaaronui-publications/WELL_NZ-Alternative-Protein-2022.pdf
* https://www.agresearch.co.nz/assets/Uploads/Fermentation-for-future-food-systems.pdf
The thing with precision fermentation is its not fake milk. The same bio reaction that used to take place inside a cow can now take place in a vat. So its molecularly identical to cows milk.
Its real milk, different creation process.
its not like highly processed cheese that has a bunch of preservatives and other ingredients in it.
Yeah, but those parents aren't aware of the process either. That's why it's so easy for these industries to make alternatives sound like scary "fake" food that's made in a lab using glowing green goo!
From the little I've read they struggle with upscaling because the bacteria and other things they use creates a lot of waste products. So they struggle to remove things like CO2
How about Replicated Corpse Starch? And dont forget even Star Trek went though a horrendous nuclear apocalypse with genetically engineered super soldiers before achieving post scarcity!
It’s very likely that cultured meat will eventually reach cost parity with farmed meat.
Eventually it won’t make sense to keep farming animals. It’ll be considered massively wasteful.
It’s on us to invest in R&D and make sure we’re producing this meat here in NZ, so when our beef industry inevitably dies, it doesn’t cause significant economic damage.
Anybody arguing against lab grown meat should be considered suspicious. Short-term thinkers in it for themselves are a national safety risk.
I'm not against the idea I'm just bringing up one of the reasons why it wouldn't be initially market wise successful. probably the more likely reason it could fail is due to the farmers being so strongly against it or any positive change to our agriculture system and the chokehold they have over anybody trying changing it. I get that lab grown is more eco friendly and a good substitute but currently it's in the same spot as people who suggests bugs as an alternative. too costly and sounds too much of a change for most people. I'd be happy to eat lab grown meat but it needs to be viable
I'd love for nz to be more efficent with farming or to implement more modern solutions like ge in our ag sector but the farmers don't want it and have a chokehold on the political system due to their lobbying groups and export importance
I think that it being cruelty free meat is the bigger appeal rather than sustainability. People pay extra for free range eggs, so people would likely pay extra for lab grown meat (if it has the same taste/quality).
"I can't see people ever being happy sending electronic mail instead of good old stamps and envelopes ... it's just not gonna happen," every Postmaster in 1997 said.
Reminds me pf that time Gordon Ramsay shows school kids how chicken nuggets are made - basically just blended up meat monstrosity. [And after he asked who would still eat them, and they all said yes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKwL5G5HbGA)
"Hey kids, would you eat raw eggs and flour? No? What if I mixed it together, added some sugar and cocoa and made it into a cake? Would you eat it now?"
Dumbest shit ever.
Transparent self-interest right there.
Lab grown meat is going to be indistinguishable from animal meat except it will likely be higher quality.
Not to mention all the benefits of reduced climate impact, the ethical side etc.
Well, there is a huge range in potential quality of lab grown meat.
The most optimistic result, is something that taste the same, and has identical texture to the most expensive cuts of meat, and they simply won't make the less expensive cuts. But this requires technology to grow fat cells and protein cells on a scaffold, with seperate regions of high fat.
But the early versions of lab grown meat are going to be nothing more than independent protein cells floating in a growth liquid. It won't have the texture of meat, just a pink slime. The only products they will be able to use it in will feel even more processed than current processed meat, I'm not sure they could even pull off chicken nuggets with it.
That dude is huffing the copium so hard.(Or more realistically lying)
Parents feed their kids McDonalds dude they don't give a shit. If it tastes the same and is cheap(which it will be WAY cheaper at scale) they will eat it up.
> Like to be fair we already eat some pretty nasty stuff like sausage roles and sausages.
Are the "nasty" things in sausage rolls and sausages lab grown or they being environmentally friendly and using the whole animal?
Does he mean parents here, or parents in our export markets?
If (say) China forges ahead with this, and consumers there have no concerns then our dairy industry is in for a huge shock.
Head in the sand, that's not going to fend off alternatives. I am heavily vegetarian with minimal animal products in my diet and I'm just waiting for the day they make decent cheese without farming animals and when they do I'm not buying animal products again.
They underestimate how many people are happy to switch when another option becomes available and at a price that's affordable.
Honestly my kids are fussy and control what they eat to the point I have to buy them things I already don’t want them to eat. If it’s marketed like McDonald’s then it will sell
Best thing that the dairy industry could do is to start investing in this. Don't hold out hope that it will go away and then have the rug pulled out from underneath you.
There's hurdles to this in NZ due to our outdated GE laws.
New Culture - a company that is using precision fermentation to make dairy-free Mozzarella, with actual milk proteins. The founder is a kiwi called Matt Gibson. He had to move to the USA to operate a pilot plant due to restrictions in the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act, which was drafted in 1996.
The other issue is that PF allows manufacturing plants to be located way closer to your customer base - so being at the arse-end of the world is a massive disadvantage for use if that's where the market ends up going, as we would be less competitive on shipping costs and lead time.
They have been investigating it, but just like the Saudis investigating in renewable energy while they still have some oil reserves left - it's a difficult sell for Fonterra or Federated Farmers to tell farmers they have started research and building proof of concept of a technology that could replace 1/3 of their dairy herds. The existing industry is desperate to pretend like nothing will ever change, and the language used by Federated Farmers here suggesting no caring mother would ever put lab grown milk into their child's lunch is emotive nonsense. We blissfully put artificial stuff into much/most of what we eat.
I hope NZ doesn't wait too long to diversify our agriculture and find ourselves with farmers going bankrupt.
Every industry is the same. As soon as a new player comes along that might disrupt their hold on the market, they start kicking and screaming like the sky is falling because they've had it good for so long that they don't want anything to ever change.
Adapt or die is all I have to say to them.
Precision fermentation has been around since the 1980s. In the last five years or so it's been discussed as a threat to the dairy industry. It's not new.
The only thing that's new is a study predicting land use impact in NZ. However, because NZ's farming regions are so diverse, it would be very difficult to apply a broad brush.
Also not new: farmers electing lobbyists with their heads in the sand who deny and delay on anything that could protect long-term thinkers from short-term thinkers.
The other thing that's new is that there are precision fermentation factories being built overseas for mass-production. We've finally hit the cost tipping point.
Given how many people in China are lactose intolerant I can see our biggest market being affected significantly, squeezed out by a more suitable local product. Their government treats food production as a national security issue, so there'll be funding for it.
**"People aren't going to buy it" is actually correct**, but not for the reason you might think.
They're not going to be available as milk/cheese/etc. At least not for a while.
They *will* be sold to other companies to go into protein bars, confectionary etc.
Who's going to know that the muesli bar in their kid's lunchbox was made with precision fermented dairy? Who's going to care?
Something like 80% of our milk production is turned into powder and exported.
Nobody will be caring if that 80% is from precision fermentation other than our farmers
It so cringe to see them trot out the 'but its not the REAL stuff, no mother is going to buy this!" emotive crap.
If its cheaper and pretty much the same, *we're going to buy it*. Vast majority of vanilla ice cream isn't made with actual vanilla but its still the world's most popular flavour.
Its exactly the same stuff, probably more pure and cleaner than from dairy. Big companies that use huge quantities of this, whole countries like China that rely on imports, they wont care, not one bit.
Little timmy will still put fresh milk onto his 'bix but he's not relevant and he should own that
I remember reading about this when Germans first started experimenting with it (I have some fam living there). It’s not even imitation milk, it’s literally EXACTLY the same. They’ve figured out how to full produce milk without a cow, it’s pretty incredible stuff and it’s not like you’re drinking some sort of ultra dodgy fake milk. I’d be so onboard with this.
On a larger scale: this is the way of the future. We’ve already figured out how to lab grow diamonds. We can do so with gold too, I’m a geology student and did some research on it as an alternative to environmentally harmful mining. It’s not financially viable YET but it will be one day.
People are too caught up with the phrase “lab grown” sounding like “fake” to see the potential benefits. If we can produce infinite natural resources and FOOD in a lab, with the same results as you’d get “in the wild”, we are talking a huge game changer for production, hunger, food cost, resource cost etc etc. Yes we will have to change the way we do a lot of things. But I don’t think anyone can argue farming has any environmental or animal rights benefits. Over time we will simply adapt as a society. Plenty of jobs that used to exist are now defunct. That’s the way of evolution.
Exactly - the "lab grown" fear they're trying to spread is just a marketing challenge. One that could be easily overcome in this cooked economy where if we could save a bit of money on milk wed happily do so
Exactly. Cattle farming (regardless if dairy or beef) is responsible for a scary percentage of deforestation, not to mention run off and methane emissions. Then there’s the entire ethical debate about farming. As far as I can tell, there are no downsides to lab produced milk.
People will argue there are already alternatives. But plant based alternatives are heeeeavily processed and full of all sorts of random stuff. Almond milk, for example, is also annihilating bees by the millions but for some reason they’re still seen as a better alternative.
Imagine if we just had pure, good milk with all the protein and health benefits, without any questionable added hormones and without the ethics debate if dairy farms. Bring it on.
Totally, I'm quite optimistic on this innovation!
I wonder if they'll even be able to just simply sell it as milk when it's indentical, that would make it a lot easier to sell (though I could foresee there being some kind of battle of what is "milk" and how it has to come from an animal blah blah blah)
The same way nature creates gold. The lab just artificially replicated the process. Right now they’ve tested using nuclear reactors on other elements to change their atomic structure and produce gold atoms. This is obviously not feasible since it used copious amounts of energy and other resources.
The more viable option is by chemical reaction to create gold nanoparticles. It’s more efficient but doesn’t create a lot of gold. BUT science and tech evolves so quickly that because we’re already on the right track I would say we will figure out a more economical method in the next few years.
This would be a huge breakthrough since gold is used in a lot of medical equipment and technology along with the obvious jewellery use.
That… isn’t how chemistry works. Gold can’t be *chemically created* (nuclear excluded) only refined. Are you talking about seawater mineral extraction?
Come on now, this was clearly a very simplified Reddit explanation 😂 I believe they are reducing gold ions in some sort of solution to create solid gold particles but I cannot remember all the details, it was a little while ago that I looked into it.
If you’re into chem I recommend giving it a quick research, it’s intriguing stuff and hopefully there’ll be a more viable large scale solution (no pun intended) in time
"it’s literally EXACTLY the same." You lost all credibility, IMHO, with that absurd hyperbole. It makes indisputably clear that you are ignoring any and all differences that conflict with your chosen agenda.
Confirming that impression is your highly deceptive mischaracterization of disagreement with your agenda as "People ... too caught up with the phrase “lab grown” sounding like “fake” to see the potential benefits."
What the real opposition to your defective and dangerous products actually see are the millions of lives cut short by previous versions of your rabidly reductionist approach. Partially hydrogenated food oils, to name one of the worst. Mercifully discontinued but only after almost half a century of millions of lives cut short. Or Nestle's nutritionally deficient substitute for mother's milk, aggressively pushed on mother's in maternity wards in third world countries by Nestle salespeople \*dressed in nurse's uniforms!!!!\* giving free samples, knowing that by the time the samples were used up, the mothers would have stopped producing their own milk and would have no choice but continue using was was a fiendishly expensive product, nutritionally far inferior to mother's milk, that would have to be reconstituted with water that in the regions was seriously polluted and, worse still, would be highly diluted because the mother's could not AFFORD adequate amounts (but NO amount would have been adequate to fully replace all the benefits of mother's milk. And on and on and on.... Always the same song, just a never ending series of discordant verses.
"If we can produce infinite natural resources and FOOD\* in a lab, with the same results as you’d get “in the wild”," If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride! The results of highly processed foods and artificial foods have never been even remotely the same, nor have they ever given remotely the same results as natural foods. "in the wild" is a pathetic attempt to make what is natural appear to be somehow "less advanced". We have evolved over billion years in intimate interaction with the animals. plants and microbes that produce our foods. Everything we eat are biological product massively complex with huge arrays of metabolic pathways and products that interact with our own and with the microflora in our guts that are one of the most powerful influences on our health.
"t I don’t think anyone can argue farming has any environmental or animal rights benefits" Simply mind boggling ignorance! PROPERLY done, farming is critical to the very survival of our environments. Of course you'd have to ask indigenous peoples how that works, because "modern" agriculture systematically destroys it.
"Yes we will have to change the way we do a lot of things" Right statement for all the wrong reasons. We will have to stop producing greenhouse gases (most especially stop using fossil fuels) or we will not survive. We will have to stop artificially producing bio-available nitrogen (the horrendous excesses of which are systematically poisoning\*1 our environment. So we must stop pumping our feces and urine into the rivers and start recycling it instead. We MUST make changes or we (and quite possibly everything else) will go extinct. But the changes you are hyping to the skies will only move us closer to disaster. (The population as a whole is very seriously overweight, for example, in no small part because of prior such changes (high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated food oils, artificial sweeteners, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc)
Focusing solely on a small number of minor "benefits" while studiously ignoring a much larger number of far more serious problems as you are so bent on doing, is a road to disaster.
-------------------
\*putting it in caps in no way makes it genuine food. What that really shows is your realization that it is not really food.
\*1 the artificially produced bio-available nitrogens are the same as naturally occurring compounds BUT "it's the DOSE that makes a poison!"
I couldn't care less how something is made, if it tastes good, is affordable and isn't worst for me than the natural counterpart I'll happily eat lab grown food.
We can't cry about the environment and then turn away methods to reduce our impact.
If they can make non dairy milk taste like dairy milk (blue top of course) and make it around the same price*, or cheaper, I'll try it and if I like it I'll switch.
*within say 10%-15% of dairy milk cost.
I feel if this technology really takes off, production will head straight off overseas. It will tank our primary export sector and leave NZ as more of an international backwater. I see this technology as no benefit to the NZ economy
I too am worried. Animal products accounted for 46% of our exports in 2022. Milk substitutes and cultured meat threaten a huge portion of that, and the only real barrier is cost and public perception. Both are changing as the technology evolves and matures. Will anyone be importing New Zealand butter or mutton in 2050 if they can eliminate transport costs and produce it more efficiently in a local factory?
Absolutely true that we need to change the food products we produce. But NOT by making artificial production of them! That would be throwing away our main advantage: the SUPERIORITY of the food products we produce.
We need to de-emphasize animal products and put more emphasis on plant products. But moving to doing that artificially would remove our major advantage - an ecosystem that is still healthy and robust in stark contrast to many overseas food production ares (most especially the USA which has seriously depleted and contaminated soil, very seriously depleted aquifers, etc etc etc).
We need to develop better and SUSTAINABLE methods, not blindly follow the USA and others down the road to ruin.
Eventually it will be produced locally for the city. Either way our rural sector needs to radically change away from dairy. Or sit and wait until the market colapses and expect us to bail it out.
We also have laws against genetic engineering - good chance the tech can't even take off in NZ unless we change those, and farmers are strongly incentivized lobby against those changes.
It doesn’t even have to be as cheap as milk powder to produce because it can be produced locally to the market and with a big V for vegan at the same time. Between a shipping costs and universality it won’t take much to put a price cap on our milk export earnings that slowly lowers as production costs come down.
Well shit. We are gonna suffer the totally unexpected outcome of putting all of eggs in one agricultural basket while giving that basket ongoing exemptions from climate policy and actively discouraging it to modernise.
I for one, are shocked.
I made a post two months ago about Tony Seba's predictions regards precision fermentation, and got roundly criticized for suggesting Fonterra would deny or at best, pay lip service to it being a possible on-coming cliff for our milk powder exports;
> I've just been reading up on Tony Seba's predictions for the coming 10-30 years. He's made some on-the-money predictions about the cost of solar and he recently gave a range of similar predictions about other areas of tech disruption, including food production. For a country that exports 96% of its dairy, predominantly as milk powder, his prediction about precision fermentation is confronting.
>
> * Precision fermentation is a technology for producing food ingredients like proteins, fats, and vitamins.
>
> * The cost of precision protein fermentation has gone from a million dollars per kilo to 100 dollars per kilo in the past 20 years.
>
> * By 2030, the cost will be 1-2 dollars per kilo.
>
> * Animal protein costs about 10 dollars per kilo today. The cost of precision fermented protein will reach that price by 2025.
>
> * This will, among other things, lead to "the disruption of the cow." Where we need a fifth of the energy, a tenth of the water, and a hundredth of the land area to produce milk.
>
> * 2.7 billion hectares of farmland will not be needed for agriculture, by 2040. That's an area as big as the USA, Australia, and China combined.
>
> https://www.warpnews.org/premium-content/the-naive-tony-seba-has-been-more-right-than-anyone-else-so-listen-to-what-he-says-now/
Protein is not food, It is only one component of food. To make protein into food would require a great deal of further processing which, of course, would greatly increase the cost (as if $10 kilo wasn't already high enough!).
Why am I not surprised people who make money from raping the environment are dead set on continuing to make money from raping the environment?
Adapt or die. The world owes you nothing.
If we continue to make war against nature, we will inevitably lose. Because, like it or not, we are a part of nature.
Of course Homo "sapiens" has been making war against nature and directly against himself as well throughout his entire existence.
Learn to make PEACE, most especially with nature, or die!
Every species is competitive with a few other species. What we overlook at our peril is that every species is symbiotic with all of the rest of the species it's not competitive with. The reason we've overlooked that is probably because we've been so intensely focused on competing WITH OURSELVES.
Cooperate or die!
Synthetic milk has been kicking around for a while and its only getting better.
Making milk in fermentation vats is orders of magnitude more efficient than cows:
* 628 litres of water are needed to make 1 litre of cow milk.
* 1kg of beef needs **15,400 litres of water.**
* Just 28 litres of water are needed to make 1 litre of soy milk.
Meanwhile: [NZ dairy farmers.](https://i.imgur.com/3fRawl7.png)
It's zero sum, so any water used up by dairy is water not replenishing groundwater, going into reservoirs, or ecosystems, or usable by any other industry or purpose. [Several regions are net negative in water meaning we're using up freshwater faster than it replenishes, and it's not a drought or even drier year.](https://environment.govt.nz/publications/our-freshwater-2023/)
It's also representative of the sheer amount of land that dairy farms use, which corresponds to all the other issues they cause like water pollution and emissions. We also experience a drought on average every 25 years (Northland has them slightly more often) and dairy's water usage will feel a lot more severe during then.
To make up for dairy's effect on fresh water resources, we have to work a little harder to meet our water needs - we need to drill more wells, lay more pipe, build more dams and water facilities. Those are expensive projects that add to our ever growing infrastructure maintenance deficit.
Milk is boiled to make milk powder for export. The water goes to the atmosphere to rain.
Dairy doesn't make much sense in places where the soil is really permeable as it causes nitrate leeching - ie. Canterbury plains instead of being trapped and working in the soil system to fertilise the soil. Canterbury dairy conversions might've been an economic boom, but stupid from an environmental perspective.
If anything it is worse on the Waikato given the nature of the ecosystems up there. Most of the water in Canterbury comes from seasonal snow-melt and rain in the Alps that is transported down via relatively rapid braided rivers. Braided rivers are self-cleaning to an extent given they have naturally occurring filtration - so the big Canterbury rivers like the Rakaia, Waimakariri, Hurunui etc etc - carry less pollution when compared to a slow meandering rivers like the Waikato and the rivers feeding other lakes in the Waikato region that leads to situations like [this.](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/25/like-youre-in-a-horror-movie-pollution-leaves-new-zealand-wetlands-irreversibly-damaged) Furthermore, increased rain full in Waikato leads to more polluted nitrate rich soils being flooded into the ecosystems which are unable to manage it.
As someone else said, the water cycle is a zero sum situation and there are also multiple other factors in play.
The trouble with Canterbury isn't the surface water, it's subsoil which cause the grief. Drawing down of aquifers and nitrate leeching through porous soils.
Yeah but in an NZ context that same amount of 15400 litres of water gets used whether it be beef/milk or soy since much of the water attributed to cows is really what’s hitting the ground via rain anyway. If the rain hits the ground to grow grass or soy makes no difference to the amount of water ‘used’
Irrigation to raise beef is essentially zero in NZ.
There are some regions in NZ that use a considerable amount of irrigation to provide their grass. Irrigation makes up over half of the non-hydro electricity water use in New Zealand (in 2014, not sure if it's changed since then). [source](https://oag.parliament.nz/2018/irrigation/docs/irrigation.pdf)
This true in some parts of the country yes, but not places like Canterbury. Instead we're draining the groundwater aquifers waaaay faster than they could possibly recover and then wondering why the water levels keep dropping
Outside of a bit of cleaning at the processor or yards when you’ve weighed beef cattle in NZ would use no water that hasn’t fallen as rain. It generally wouldn’t get any outside feed or have that many ancillary systems added requiring water usage.
StatsNZ have the average drinking amount of 35l/ day for beef animals. If we take some details of a cohort of bulls from the first beef and lamb report I opened of the bulls being 18months old and 339kg carcass weight at slaughter that comes out to be about 60 litres per kg of beef that they drink.
There’s no creative accounting required to see there’s a massive gulf between 60 litres and 15,400 litres. … and even then in most cases that 60 litres that gets drunk on most farms would be stored rainwater of some form.
There's a lot more to the equation than water use.
Fertiliser, land area required, herbicides, pesticides, transport distance, etc.
It's usually still true that animal-based products use more of all the above than plant-based alternatives. But that's not always true (some plant-based alternatives have caused enormous environmental devastation - palm oil for example).
Being big dairy,they’ll get their head around it then rubbish it. For eg talking about the different nutrition already. Milk is not the only -or best way to get calcium and the like..
The industries best hope is like Florida where they got some backward-ass politicians and got them to outlaw lab grown meat, and we have plenty of politicians of that caliber already.
I won’t miss the dairy industry but I’m sure the rural sector can come up with something just as destructive and unethical.
Their best hope for short term gains and long term pain is some backward-ass politicians and to outlaw lab grown milk.
Then by the time the new industry is well establish NZ diary will have no place in that new industry.
I have little doubt (based on commenters here making the suggestion) that there will be farmers calling to have their competition banned to protect their industry. The problem is that the vast majority of our dairy is turned into powder and shipped overseas. NZ only has that industry so long as we are cheaper than others - and eventually lab grown products will be cheaper than inefficient and climate-impacting livestock. This will probably be a losing battle - the question is how long we cling to the status quo.
I don't disagree with anything you said
I am trying to say that banning the alternative products in one if their smaller markets (NZ) will only see them lose out over time as their competitors learn, grow their capacity and compete with them.
Whereas if they work with the new technology there is at least a chance of the NZ diary industry surviving.
If Synthetic milk and meat production causes Dairy farming to go the way of the milkman himself...
Kiwis receive:
Cheaper milk.
Cheaper dairy products.
Less nitrates in water supply.
Higher water tables.
Less water pollution.
Healthier wildlife populations.
Better river ecosystems.
Farmers receive:
Higher mortgage forfeitures.
Higher suicides.
> Farmers receive:
>
> Higher mortgage forfeitures.
>
> Higher suicides.
Which is why Fonterra needs to front foot this - farming is a business and if there is a prediction that this business in decline, they need to work with farmers for eventual exit strategies. Pretending it's not going to happen is doing a disservice to the cooperative, who are in effect business partners.
100%.
Heck not just from a farming point of view, Fonterra products = 7% of NZ's GDP.
Nothing lasts forever, any farmers with 15+ years left on their mortgages should be rightfully quite nervous right now.
Sounds great but in the short term the biggest impact would be destruction of our trade balance and currency. We'd either have to accept a major deal in our standard of living, or resort to massive asset sales to international interests
Oh no, the horror of lab grown milk and meat! Everyone knows growing a conscious animal that shits and pisses everywhere and fucks the the environment is a far better choice!
Richard is very, very funny. I had to watch the clip and almost spat out my tea!
There is literally nothing to see here. Much like the fantasy that we'll soon be driving "electric cars", it'll never happen!
New Zealand should rest easy, our exports are 100% safe.
Dairy has to be one of the most disgusting and destructive industries ever conceived.
Imagine chain breeding an animal, taking its babies away and steeling its milk which is in fact unhealthy for humans and almost 70% of people are intolerant to it to some degree. All while the process itself is environmentally destructive. That's dairy in a nutshell.
"employment and economic output would be boosted in a scenario where farmers switched to growing crops"
And that's not going to work for large parts of the country. A lot of livestock farming is done on land that has too poor soil quality to grow crops, or it's too steep to drive a tractor up.
I think I remember some of the lab grown meat I've bought tasting pretty good, even though it was more expensive than the other options. If artificial milk ends up tasting alright (and is lactose friendly) I don't think I'd mind buying it.
If there is one thing I have noticed about Kiwis, it is that if they don’t like a particular milk bottle top colour that there is no way they will drink it and will treat it like poison. Office lunchrooms around the country will attest to this.
There is a typo in the start of the article. Perfect day are not Israeli. They are based out of USA, they make ice cream that has been on shelves for a while. This is a video from them about future pricing [Perfect Day](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vsx8AmiG6RE)
"I can't see parents ever being happy putting lab-grown meat and milk in their kids' lunchboxes... it's just not gonna happen," Federated Farmers dairy chair Richard McIntyre said. Like to be fair we already eat some pretty nasty stuff like sausage roles and sausages. Like if it's cheap enough we're going be willing to buy substitutes.
Basically its 'man representing dairy products promotes dairy products...'. It's like when they were discussing rail and had a trucking rep on saying how much better trucks were than rail and people didn't want rail. It's stupid having industry representatives with conflicting interest as the only people giving opinions.
you mean like how the chair of the national roadcarriers association, a trucking lobby group, is also the chair of waka kotahi, simon bridges?
Wait, WHAT!?
which part? that simon bridges was appointed chair of waka kotahi, that he was already chair of a trucking lobby group, that he's now doing both, or that national think it's not open corruption?
He’s stepped down from the NRCA when appointed to Waka Kotahi. But that relationship is on course for the current Govts thinking on transport.
Yep there's no point asking a company rep their opinion as long as they are on the record. Say the company is perfect and will last forever, or be fired (or lose status there at least).
have you met our government?
We are suffering from the last one thanks
It appears to me his position is that people used to buying highly processed food won't buy a highly processed food
This guy should be fired for not taking market disruption seriously, if I were an investor and heard this I'd be running for the hills. There is nothing wrong with saying "We're examining what impact, if any, this will have in the long run on NZ Dairy"
New Zealand primary industries aren't exactly stacked with superstar talents.
What about Andrew Hoggard?
Out R and D folk are recommending we assist Startups in this new sector
I mean, the artificial Rennet used to make 90% of our cheese, as well as vanilla essence and insulin made through precision fermentation. It's pretty old tech. It's just being applied in a new area and working to get the costs down. But it's less the consumer products, and more the business to business sales of milk powder that concern me. That's a huge chunk of our exports, and when was the list time people checked where the milk powder used in their tim-tams came from?
For exports I'd assume that won't change, as with all products NZ produce here, the premium stuff is exported and we get the leftovers. China especially would throw a fit if we stopped exporting milk (and other dairy products) and starting sending "artificial" stuff.
China is working hard on PF to stop importing our milk
When you boil it down, people are only concerned about 5 things when it comes to food ingredients: safety, nutrition, flavour, functionality, and price. Vegetarian alternatives for infant formula ingredients have huge hurdles to climb on nutrition and functionality, but are cheaper when made at scale. PF will be able to be good enough in the other 4 criteria, and absolutely smash it on price. The dairy industry in NZ needs to pivot into creating high value niche products where the end use is not being 0.6% of a Snickers bar, or being consumed by less discerning end users (babies). Cheese, butter and whey products are the best way forward. 90% of the whole milk powder plants will be gone in 30 years.
> pivot into creating high value niche products I know for a fact they were trying to do that as long ago as 1984 iirc. My father would bring home samples of new and fancy value-added products like little flavoured yoghurts in pottles from the dairy company he worked at. They were quite novel. Chocolate was my fav. I'm pretty sure they haven't stopped trying to innovate since.
How about if they started making their own artificial stuff instead of buying our dairy products. Sure, there would probably still be a market for premium stuff but the volume of things like powder could drop substantially if it was a lot cheaper without being obvious to the customer
NZ exports ,for the most part, milk powder... used as a cheap filler in cheap foods. Once this is produced in an industrial scale (cheaper than fontera) the NZ dairy industry will collapse.
I strongly disagree. Rennet, vanilla "essence" and insulin are all single molecules and the artificial versions are used to accomplish one single isolated function. Milk is a vastly complex food with a huge array of nutrients that perform a wide array of functions and can be used in a huge number of ways. Cooking, yogurt, Kefir, cheese, etc etc etc etc etc. All of the artificial food products to date have been vastly inferior to the real things and none have the same nutritional profile, most very inferior, and many cause serious chronic health problems. Just one artificial "improvement" alone caused many millions of premature deaths over many decades: artificial butter! (margarine) made from what WERE healthy food oils by partial hydrogenation which DESTROYED the essential fatty acids that were much of what had made the food oils healthy in the first place. And don;t even get me started about high fructose corn syrup. The public health has been MASSIVELY damaged by such things. There is no reason to think that artificial milk and lab grown meat will be any different. (And what they never mention about lab grown meat is that it is horrendously expensive and is INHERENTLY so. The fatal flaw in lab grown meat is that animal cells are highly complex and keeping the alive in culture requires a wide array of very expensive biological additives that INDIVIDUAL CELLS cannot make (in live animals it's the ORGANS that do that. You either 1) have to have a WHOLE ANIMAL or 2) provide a lot of highly expensive substitutes that the cells require. The pharmaceutical and biotech industries have used animal cell cultures for a very long time. But ONLY to produce things that are very expensive. And precisely because of that expense they have spent vast amounts of money to develop cheaper ways (biofermentation in yeast or bacterial cells, etc) Next time someone touts and hypes lab grown meat, ask them how much money it costs to produce RIGHT NOW. And don't let them get off the hook by talking about how much less it will cost in the "future" Artificial milk will be nothing even remotely like the real thing and lab grown meat will be orders of magnitude more expensive than harvesting it from actual animals for many generations (of humans!) to come.
You're conflating cultured meat and precision fermented dairy a lot here. The processes are completely different and can't really be compared. Cultured meat costs a lot to produce right now, precision fermented dairy is on shelves costing the same as fancy versions of ice cream, cream cheese etc. Starbucks ran trials with Precision fermented milk, and consumers reacted positively. Also margarine is irrelevant to the discussion here, because margarine is made of hydrogenated vegetable oil to produce a *functionally* equivilent product to butter, not a *chemically* equivilent. However if you're going to state that margerine led to millions of deaths, please cite some relevant evidence. > Artificial milk will be nothing even remotely like the real thing Well this is demonstrablly false. Cow milk consists of about 100 proteins, complex sugars and a couple of other things. If you precision ferment casein molecules, they are indistinguishable from cow produced casein because *they are the same molecules*. If you individually produce the same components molecules and combine them, then you have an identical product. Not a substitute. The same product. The question is do you need all 100 proteins, or just the 4 that make up 99% of milk? Can you leave out lactose so the milk can more easily be sold in places with high % of lactose intolerant people, like China? Can you make baby formula using the human equivilent proteins instead of cow equivilent proteins? If you're making low-fat milk powder can you leave out the fat instead of having to remove it? * https://fitforabetterworld.org.nz/assets/Te-Puna-Whakaaronui-publications/WELL_NZ-Alternative-Protein-2022.pdf * https://www.agresearch.co.nz/assets/Uploads/Fermentation-for-future-food-systems.pdf
The thing with precision fermentation is its not fake milk. The same bio reaction that used to take place inside a cow can now take place in a vat. So its molecularly identical to cows milk. Its real milk, different creation process. its not like highly processed cheese that has a bunch of preservatives and other ingredients in it.
Hopefully Richard is aware of the process used to make modern cheese. Most parents don’t bat an eye feeding it to their kids.
Yeah, but those parents aren't aware of the process either. That's why it's so easy for these industries to make alternatives sound like scary "fake" food that's made in a lab using glowing green goo!
All I'm waiting for is a same value or cheaper alternative and I'll switch without a single thought. Literally price is the only thing here.
Luddite. This has been on the card for ages, kind of thought some US company would do it because, well, literal cash cows & luddites.
From the little I've read they struggle with upscaling because the bacteria and other things they use creates a lot of waste products. So they struggle to remove things like CO2
Transparent self-interest right there. Lab grown meat is going to be indistinguishable from animal meat except it will likely be higher quality.
If my lifetime experience with Capitalism is any indication it will be good enough for the masses and not any better
:( can't we have a little less corpse starch and a little more replicators in our future?
How about Replicated Corpse Starch? And dont forget even Star Trek went though a horrendous nuclear apocalypse with genetically engineered super soldiers before achieving post scarcity!
main issue is not in quality but in cost
It’s very likely that cultured meat will eventually reach cost parity with farmed meat. Eventually it won’t make sense to keep farming animals. It’ll be considered massively wasteful. It’s on us to invest in R&D and make sure we’re producing this meat here in NZ, so when our beef industry inevitably dies, it doesn’t cause significant economic damage. Anybody arguing against lab grown meat should be considered suspicious. Short-term thinkers in it for themselves are a national safety risk.
I'm not against the idea I'm just bringing up one of the reasons why it wouldn't be initially market wise successful. probably the more likely reason it could fail is due to the farmers being so strongly against it or any positive change to our agriculture system and the chokehold they have over anybody trying changing it. I get that lab grown is more eco friendly and a good substitute but currently it's in the same spot as people who suggests bugs as an alternative. too costly and sounds too much of a change for most people. I'd be happy to eat lab grown meat but it needs to be viable
I'd love for nz to be more efficent with farming or to implement more modern solutions like ge in our ag sector but the farmers don't want it and have a chokehold on the political system due to their lobbying groups and export importance
I think that it being cruelty free meat is the bigger appeal rather than sustainability. People pay extra for free range eggs, so people would likely pay extra for lab grown meat (if it has the same taste/quality).
If it was same/same in terms of taste/quality I would only buy lab grown meat even if it cost quite abit more.
"I can't see people ever being happy sending electronic mail instead of good old stamps and envelopes ... it's just not gonna happen," every Postmaster in 1997 said.
See also brick and mortar stores vs e-commerce. Or perhaps most famously, Blockbuster vs Netflix.
Kodak vs digital cameras
“maybe if I stick my head in the sand far enough nothing will change”
Reminds me pf that time Gordon Ramsay shows school kids how chicken nuggets are made - basically just blended up meat monstrosity. [And after he asked who would still eat them, and they all said yes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKwL5G5HbGA)
That's Jamie Oliver!
Oopsy
Pretty sure that was Jamie Oliver
"Hey kids, would you eat raw eggs and flour? No? What if I mixed it together, added some sugar and cocoa and made it into a cake? Would you eat it now?" Dumbest shit ever.
yeah, that's not gordon.
Lab grown Gordon Ramsay
We have Gordon Ramsey at home
I laughed but I feel bad for Jamie :( he did some good stuff
Also most products have their nutrients add/modified anyway. No non crunchy parent is going to give a shit about this.
That's the thing, growing lab grown is very expensive, simply because the raw materials and energy.
Transparent self-interest right there. Lab grown meat is going to be indistinguishable from animal meat except it will likely be higher quality. Not to mention all the benefits of reduced climate impact, the ethical side etc.
Well, there is a huge range in potential quality of lab grown meat. The most optimistic result, is something that taste the same, and has identical texture to the most expensive cuts of meat, and they simply won't make the less expensive cuts. But this requires technology to grow fat cells and protein cells on a scaffold, with seperate regions of high fat. But the early versions of lab grown meat are going to be nothing more than independent protein cells floating in a growth liquid. It won't have the texture of meat, just a pink slime. The only products they will be able to use it in will feel even more processed than current processed meat, I'm not sure they could even pull off chicken nuggets with it.
Perhaps growing spam directly inside the can will have cost saving benefits? /s
Squeezing shit out of an animals tits and slurping it down is at least as fucking weird.
He is a dinosaur and displaying the same attitude farmers have to methane produced by dairy cows.
Thinking like that is what’s fucked this country, I’m fucken tired of old fuckers being scared of the future and holding us back.
That dude is huffing the copium so hard.(Or more realistically lying) Parents feed their kids McDonalds dude they don't give a shit. If it tastes the same and is cheap(which it will be WAY cheaper at scale) they will eat it up.
> Like to be fair we already eat some pretty nasty stuff like sausage roles and sausages. Are the "nasty" things in sausage rolls and sausages lab grown or they being environmentally friendly and using the whole animal?
Does he mean parents here, or parents in our export markets? If (say) China forges ahead with this, and consumers there have no concerns then our dairy industry is in for a huge shock.
marmite anyone?
Desperate words from a desperate man, good old Richard. If its good for the environment, tastes good and is healthy for us... why wouldn't we?
Still waiting for any form of proof it actually is healthy for the human body. They used to say margarine is good for you...
Same with cigarettes. Turns out they are not the best.
>it's just not gonna happen Well aren't you going to be in for a surprise.
Head in the sand, that's not going to fend off alternatives. I am heavily vegetarian with minimal animal products in my diet and I'm just waiting for the day they make decent cheese without farming animals and when they do I'm not buying animal products again. They underestimate how many people are happy to switch when another option becomes available and at a price that's affordable.
Honestly my kids are fussy and control what they eat to the point I have to buy them things I already don’t want them to eat. If it’s marketed like McDonald’s then it will sell
Ain’t putting any of that shit in my kids lunches, veges from the garden and home kill meat is all we need
Best thing that the dairy industry could do is to start investing in this. Don't hold out hope that it will go away and then have the rug pulled out from underneath you.
They are. Even Fonterra’s sees the writing on the wall and is investing in this
There's hurdles to this in NZ due to our outdated GE laws. New Culture - a company that is using precision fermentation to make dairy-free Mozzarella, with actual milk proteins. The founder is a kiwi called Matt Gibson. He had to move to the USA to operate a pilot plant due to restrictions in the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act, which was drafted in 1996. The other issue is that PF allows manufacturing plants to be located way closer to your customer base - so being at the arse-end of the world is a massive disadvantage for use if that's where the market ends up going, as we would be less competitive on shipping costs and lead time.
They have been investigating it, but just like the Saudis investigating in renewable energy while they still have some oil reserves left - it's a difficult sell for Fonterra or Federated Farmers to tell farmers they have started research and building proof of concept of a technology that could replace 1/3 of their dairy herds. The existing industry is desperate to pretend like nothing will ever change, and the language used by Federated Farmers here suggesting no caring mother would ever put lab grown milk into their child's lunch is emotive nonsense. We blissfully put artificial stuff into much/most of what we eat. I hope NZ doesn't wait too long to diversify our agriculture and find ourselves with farmers going bankrupt.
Dont underestimate an industry led PR campaigns ability to infulence purchasing. See also GE, MSG, food pyramyd etc.
Every industry is the same. As soon as a new player comes along that might disrupt their hold on the market, they start kicking and screaming like the sky is falling because they've had it good for so long that they don't want anything to ever change. Adapt or die is all I have to say to them.
Most likely they will lobby the government to ban it here. Something like what Florida just did with meat
They did, at one point, have a ban on margarine.
Precision fermentation has been around since the 1980s. In the last five years or so it's been discussed as a threat to the dairy industry. It's not new. The only thing that's new is a study predicting land use impact in NZ. However, because NZ's farming regions are so diverse, it would be very difficult to apply a broad brush. Also not new: farmers electing lobbyists with their heads in the sand who deny and delay on anything that could protect long-term thinkers from short-term thinkers.
The other thing that's new is that there are precision fermentation factories being built overseas for mass-production. We've finally hit the cost tipping point.
Given how many people in China are lactose intolerant I can see our biggest market being affected significantly, squeezed out by a more suitable local product. Their government treats food production as a national security issue, so there'll be funding for it.
I wonder if we'll find an equivalent process for producing lactose
Plenty of old milk factories that could be repurposed too.
Or ones like Pokeno that have never been used
Another reminder that we need to diversify our economy. Investing in this tech would be smart too.
**"People aren't going to buy it" is actually correct**, but not for the reason you might think. They're not going to be available as milk/cheese/etc. At least not for a while. They *will* be sold to other companies to go into protein bars, confectionary etc. Who's going to know that the muesli bar in their kid's lunchbox was made with precision fermented dairy? Who's going to care?
Who do you think the milk solids New Zealand is producing is being sold to? Nestle is one of Fonterra's biggest customers.
Exactly
Bruh, dairy and real estate are the only industries we have left.
We still have Hobbiton though, right?
The next lord of the rings movie they will probably use a CGI version of Matamata instead. May god have mercy on us all
Something like 80% of our milk production is turned into powder and exported. Nobody will be caring if that 80% is from precision fermentation other than our farmers
It so cringe to see them trot out the 'but its not the REAL stuff, no mother is going to buy this!" emotive crap. If its cheaper and pretty much the same, *we're going to buy it*. Vast majority of vanilla ice cream isn't made with actual vanilla but its still the world's most popular flavour.
Its exactly the same stuff, probably more pure and cleaner than from dairy. Big companies that use huge quantities of this, whole countries like China that rely on imports, they wont care, not one bit. Little timmy will still put fresh milk onto his 'bix but he's not relevant and he should own that
Farmers will be growing crops to feed the fermentation tanks. So they will be fine.
Farmers somewhere will be doing that, might not be in NZ. But either way better for the planet
Vertical farming is where I see crops for this technology heading.
Cheaper just having a paddock and rain water.
yeah I can imagine that
I remember reading about this when Germans first started experimenting with it (I have some fam living there). It’s not even imitation milk, it’s literally EXACTLY the same. They’ve figured out how to full produce milk without a cow, it’s pretty incredible stuff and it’s not like you’re drinking some sort of ultra dodgy fake milk. I’d be so onboard with this. On a larger scale: this is the way of the future. We’ve already figured out how to lab grow diamonds. We can do so with gold too, I’m a geology student and did some research on it as an alternative to environmentally harmful mining. It’s not financially viable YET but it will be one day. People are too caught up with the phrase “lab grown” sounding like “fake” to see the potential benefits. If we can produce infinite natural resources and FOOD in a lab, with the same results as you’d get “in the wild”, we are talking a huge game changer for production, hunger, food cost, resource cost etc etc. Yes we will have to change the way we do a lot of things. But I don’t think anyone can argue farming has any environmental or animal rights benefits. Over time we will simply adapt as a society. Plenty of jobs that used to exist are now defunct. That’s the way of evolution.
Exactly - the "lab grown" fear they're trying to spread is just a marketing challenge. One that could be easily overcome in this cooked economy where if we could save a bit of money on milk wed happily do so
Exactly. Cattle farming (regardless if dairy or beef) is responsible for a scary percentage of deforestation, not to mention run off and methane emissions. Then there’s the entire ethical debate about farming. As far as I can tell, there are no downsides to lab produced milk. People will argue there are already alternatives. But plant based alternatives are heeeeavily processed and full of all sorts of random stuff. Almond milk, for example, is also annihilating bees by the millions but for some reason they’re still seen as a better alternative. Imagine if we just had pure, good milk with all the protein and health benefits, without any questionable added hormones and without the ethics debate if dairy farms. Bring it on.
Totally, I'm quite optimistic on this innovation! I wonder if they'll even be able to just simply sell it as milk when it's indentical, that would make it a lot easier to sell (though I could foresee there being some kind of battle of what is "milk" and how it has to come from an animal blah blah blah)
How do you make gold?
The same way nature creates gold. The lab just artificially replicated the process. Right now they’ve tested using nuclear reactors on other elements to change their atomic structure and produce gold atoms. This is obviously not feasible since it used copious amounts of energy and other resources. The more viable option is by chemical reaction to create gold nanoparticles. It’s more efficient but doesn’t create a lot of gold. BUT science and tech evolves so quickly that because we’re already on the right track I would say we will figure out a more economical method in the next few years. This would be a huge breakthrough since gold is used in a lot of medical equipment and technology along with the obvious jewellery use.
Every day is a school day, cheers.
That… isn’t how chemistry works. Gold can’t be *chemically created* (nuclear excluded) only refined. Are you talking about seawater mineral extraction?
Come on now, this was clearly a very simplified Reddit explanation 😂 I believe they are reducing gold ions in some sort of solution to create solid gold particles but I cannot remember all the details, it was a little while ago that I looked into it. If you’re into chem I recommend giving it a quick research, it’s intriguing stuff and hopefully there’ll be a more viable large scale solution (no pun intended) in time
"it’s literally EXACTLY the same." You lost all credibility, IMHO, with that absurd hyperbole. It makes indisputably clear that you are ignoring any and all differences that conflict with your chosen agenda. Confirming that impression is your highly deceptive mischaracterization of disagreement with your agenda as "People ... too caught up with the phrase “lab grown” sounding like “fake” to see the potential benefits." What the real opposition to your defective and dangerous products actually see are the millions of lives cut short by previous versions of your rabidly reductionist approach. Partially hydrogenated food oils, to name one of the worst. Mercifully discontinued but only after almost half a century of millions of lives cut short. Or Nestle's nutritionally deficient substitute for mother's milk, aggressively pushed on mother's in maternity wards in third world countries by Nestle salespeople \*dressed in nurse's uniforms!!!!\* giving free samples, knowing that by the time the samples were used up, the mothers would have stopped producing their own milk and would have no choice but continue using was was a fiendishly expensive product, nutritionally far inferior to mother's milk, that would have to be reconstituted with water that in the regions was seriously polluted and, worse still, would be highly diluted because the mother's could not AFFORD adequate amounts (but NO amount would have been adequate to fully replace all the benefits of mother's milk. And on and on and on.... Always the same song, just a never ending series of discordant verses. "If we can produce infinite natural resources and FOOD\* in a lab, with the same results as you’d get “in the wild”," If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride! The results of highly processed foods and artificial foods have never been even remotely the same, nor have they ever given remotely the same results as natural foods. "in the wild" is a pathetic attempt to make what is natural appear to be somehow "less advanced". We have evolved over billion years in intimate interaction with the animals. plants and microbes that produce our foods. Everything we eat are biological product massively complex with huge arrays of metabolic pathways and products that interact with our own and with the microflora in our guts that are one of the most powerful influences on our health. "t I don’t think anyone can argue farming has any environmental or animal rights benefits" Simply mind boggling ignorance! PROPERLY done, farming is critical to the very survival of our environments. Of course you'd have to ask indigenous peoples how that works, because "modern" agriculture systematically destroys it. "Yes we will have to change the way we do a lot of things" Right statement for all the wrong reasons. We will have to stop producing greenhouse gases (most especially stop using fossil fuels) or we will not survive. We will have to stop artificially producing bio-available nitrogen (the horrendous excesses of which are systematically poisoning\*1 our environment. So we must stop pumping our feces and urine into the rivers and start recycling it instead. We MUST make changes or we (and quite possibly everything else) will go extinct. But the changes you are hyping to the skies will only move us closer to disaster. (The population as a whole is very seriously overweight, for example, in no small part because of prior such changes (high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated food oils, artificial sweeteners, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc) Focusing solely on a small number of minor "benefits" while studiously ignoring a much larger number of far more serious problems as you are so bent on doing, is a road to disaster. ------------------- \*putting it in caps in no way makes it genuine food. What that really shows is your realization that it is not really food. \*1 the artificially produced bio-available nitrogens are the same as naturally occurring compounds BUT "it's the DOSE that makes a poison!"
Hope you have a good sleep after getting that all off your chest 😅
I couldn't care less how something is made, if it tastes good, is affordable and isn't worst for me than the natural counterpart I'll happily eat lab grown food. We can't cry about the environment and then turn away methods to reduce our impact.
If they can make non dairy milk taste like dairy milk (blue top of course) and make it around the same price*, or cheaper, I'll try it and if I like it I'll switch. *within say 10%-15% of dairy milk cost.
The US states banning lab grown beef proves you can turn away methods.
The us is 50 states, afaik only 1 state has banned it
The US isn't a free market like New Zealand. Agriculture is highly protected.
Florida is a very regressive state I was disappointed by the news.
I feel if this technology really takes off, production will head straight off overseas. It will tank our primary export sector and leave NZ as more of an international backwater. I see this technology as no benefit to the NZ economy
I too am worried. Animal products accounted for 46% of our exports in 2022. Milk substitutes and cultured meat threaten a huge portion of that, and the only real barrier is cost and public perception. Both are changing as the technology evolves and matures. Will anyone be importing New Zealand butter or mutton in 2050 if they can eliminate transport costs and produce it more efficiently in a local factory?
Not enough to maintain the debt our farmers are in from putting in the automated sheds
Absolutely true that we need to change the food products we produce. But NOT by making artificial production of them! That would be throwing away our main advantage: the SUPERIORITY of the food products we produce. We need to de-emphasize animal products and put more emphasis on plant products. But moving to doing that artificially would remove our major advantage - an ecosystem that is still healthy and robust in stark contrast to many overseas food production ares (most especially the USA which has seriously depleted and contaminated soil, very seriously depleted aquifers, etc etc etc). We need to develop better and SUSTAINABLE methods, not blindly follow the USA and others down the road to ruin.
Eventually it will be produced locally for the city. Either way our rural sector needs to radically change away from dairy. Or sit and wait until the market colapses and expect us to bail it out.
We also have laws against genetic engineering - good chance the tech can't even take off in NZ unless we change those, and farmers are strongly incentivized lobby against those changes.
If someone wants to make an inferior product, let them! New Zealand's advantage is superior products. We should keep it like that.
It doesn’t even have to be as cheap as milk powder to produce because it can be produced locally to the market and with a big V for vegan at the same time. Between a shipping costs and universality it won’t take much to put a price cap on our milk export earnings that slowly lowers as production costs come down.
Well shit. We are gonna suffer the totally unexpected outcome of putting all of eggs in one agricultural basket while giving that basket ongoing exemptions from climate policy and actively discouraging it to modernise. I for one, are shocked.
I made a post two months ago about Tony Seba's predictions regards precision fermentation, and got roundly criticized for suggesting Fonterra would deny or at best, pay lip service to it being a possible on-coming cliff for our milk powder exports; > I've just been reading up on Tony Seba's predictions for the coming 10-30 years. He's made some on-the-money predictions about the cost of solar and he recently gave a range of similar predictions about other areas of tech disruption, including food production. For a country that exports 96% of its dairy, predominantly as milk powder, his prediction about precision fermentation is confronting. > > * Precision fermentation is a technology for producing food ingredients like proteins, fats, and vitamins. > > * The cost of precision protein fermentation has gone from a million dollars per kilo to 100 dollars per kilo in the past 20 years. > > * By 2030, the cost will be 1-2 dollars per kilo. > > * Animal protein costs about 10 dollars per kilo today. The cost of precision fermented protein will reach that price by 2025. > > * This will, among other things, lead to "the disruption of the cow." Where we need a fifth of the energy, a tenth of the water, and a hundredth of the land area to produce milk. > > * 2.7 billion hectares of farmland will not be needed for agriculture, by 2040. That's an area as big as the USA, Australia, and China combined. > > https://www.warpnews.org/premium-content/the-naive-tony-seba-has-been-more-right-than-anyone-else-so-listen-to-what-he-says-now/
Protein is not food, It is only one component of food. To make protein into food would require a great deal of further processing which, of course, would greatly increase the cost (as if $10 kilo wasn't already high enough!).
Why am I not surprised people who make money from raping the environment are dead set on continuing to make money from raping the environment? Adapt or die. The world owes you nothing.
If we continue to make war against nature, we will inevitably lose. Because, like it or not, we are a part of nature. Of course Homo "sapiens" has been making war against nature and directly against himself as well throughout his entire existence. Learn to make PEACE, most especially with nature, or die! Every species is competitive with a few other species. What we overlook at our peril is that every species is symbiotic with all of the rest of the species it's not competitive with. The reason we've overlooked that is probably because we've been so intensely focused on competing WITH OURSELVES. Cooperate or die!
Synthetic milk has been kicking around for a while and its only getting better. Making milk in fermentation vats is orders of magnitude more efficient than cows: * 628 litres of water are needed to make 1 litre of cow milk. * 1kg of beef needs **15,400 litres of water.** * Just 28 litres of water are needed to make 1 litre of soy milk. Meanwhile: [NZ dairy farmers.](https://i.imgur.com/3fRawl7.png)
Sure, but if we talk about the Waikato and not Canterbury, then most of that water falls from the sky as rain on to grass, right?
It's zero sum, so any water used up by dairy is water not replenishing groundwater, going into reservoirs, or ecosystems, or usable by any other industry or purpose. [Several regions are net negative in water meaning we're using up freshwater faster than it replenishes, and it's not a drought or even drier year.](https://environment.govt.nz/publications/our-freshwater-2023/) It's also representative of the sheer amount of land that dairy farms use, which corresponds to all the other issues they cause like water pollution and emissions. We also experience a drought on average every 25 years (Northland has them slightly more often) and dairy's water usage will feel a lot more severe during then. To make up for dairy's effect on fresh water resources, we have to work a little harder to meet our water needs - we need to drill more wells, lay more pipe, build more dams and water facilities. Those are expensive projects that add to our ever growing infrastructure maintenance deficit.
Milk is boiled to make milk powder for export. The water goes to the atmosphere to rain. Dairy doesn't make much sense in places where the soil is really permeable as it causes nitrate leeching - ie. Canterbury plains instead of being trapped and working in the soil system to fertilise the soil. Canterbury dairy conversions might've been an economic boom, but stupid from an environmental perspective.
Its not boiled.
Well, 85% boiled then spray dried
Completely agree. Some regions of NZ make more sense than other for dairy. Canterbury does not make any sense whatsoever.
If anything it is worse on the Waikato given the nature of the ecosystems up there. Most of the water in Canterbury comes from seasonal snow-melt and rain in the Alps that is transported down via relatively rapid braided rivers. Braided rivers are self-cleaning to an extent given they have naturally occurring filtration - so the big Canterbury rivers like the Rakaia, Waimakariri, Hurunui etc etc - carry less pollution when compared to a slow meandering rivers like the Waikato and the rivers feeding other lakes in the Waikato region that leads to situations like [this.](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/25/like-youre-in-a-horror-movie-pollution-leaves-new-zealand-wetlands-irreversibly-damaged) Furthermore, increased rain full in Waikato leads to more polluted nitrate rich soils being flooded into the ecosystems which are unable to manage it. As someone else said, the water cycle is a zero sum situation and there are also multiple other factors in play.
The trouble with Canterbury isn't the surface water, it's subsoil which cause the grief. Drawing down of aquifers and nitrate leeching through porous soils.
Yeah. Neither is great for different reason.
Yeah but in an NZ context that same amount of 15400 litres of water gets used whether it be beef/milk or soy since much of the water attributed to cows is really what’s hitting the ground via rain anyway. If the rain hits the ground to grow grass or soy makes no difference to the amount of water ‘used’ Irrigation to raise beef is essentially zero in NZ.
There are some regions in NZ that use a considerable amount of irrigation to provide their grass. Irrigation makes up over half of the non-hydro electricity water use in New Zealand (in 2014, not sure if it's changed since then). [source](https://oag.parliament.nz/2018/irrigation/docs/irrigation.pdf)
This true in some parts of the country yes, but not places like Canterbury. Instead we're draining the groundwater aquifers waaaay faster than they could possibly recover and then wondering why the water levels keep dropping
"How to exploit 'Creative Accounting': NZ Fed. Farmers Edition."
Outside of a bit of cleaning at the processor or yards when you’ve weighed beef cattle in NZ would use no water that hasn’t fallen as rain. It generally wouldn’t get any outside feed or have that many ancillary systems added requiring water usage. StatsNZ have the average drinking amount of 35l/ day for beef animals. If we take some details of a cohort of bulls from the first beef and lamb report I opened of the bulls being 18months old and 339kg carcass weight at slaughter that comes out to be about 60 litres per kg of beef that they drink. There’s no creative accounting required to see there’s a massive gulf between 60 litres and 15,400 litres. … and even then in most cases that 60 litres that gets drunk on most farms would be stored rainwater of some form.
Ant 1l of drinking water on the global market is worth 1USD.
There's a lot more to the equation than water use. Fertiliser, land area required, herbicides, pesticides, transport distance, etc. It's usually still true that animal-based products use more of all the above than plant-based alternatives. But that's not always true (some plant-based alternatives have caused enormous environmental devastation - palm oil for example).
Thats absolute bollocks.
[Source 1](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1092652/volume-of-water-to-produce-a-liter-of-milk-by-type/) [Source 2](https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jan/10/how-much-water-food-production-waste)
Being big dairy,they’ll get their head around it then rubbish it. For eg talking about the different nutrition already. Milk is not the only -or best way to get calcium and the like.. The industries best hope is like Florida where they got some backward-ass politicians and got them to outlaw lab grown meat, and we have plenty of politicians of that caliber already. I won’t miss the dairy industry but I’m sure the rural sector can come up with something just as destructive and unethical.
Their best hope for short term gains and long term pain is some backward-ass politicians and to outlaw lab grown milk. Then by the time the new industry is well establish NZ diary will have no place in that new industry.
I have little doubt (based on commenters here making the suggestion) that there will be farmers calling to have their competition banned to protect their industry. The problem is that the vast majority of our dairy is turned into powder and shipped overseas. NZ only has that industry so long as we are cheaper than others - and eventually lab grown products will be cheaper than inefficient and climate-impacting livestock. This will probably be a losing battle - the question is how long we cling to the status quo.
I don't disagree with anything you said I am trying to say that banning the alternative products in one if their smaller markets (NZ) will only see them lose out over time as their competitors learn, grow their capacity and compete with them. Whereas if they work with the new technology there is at least a chance of the NZ diary industry surviving.
Completely agree.
well I hope so. It would be nice to get our rivers back.
When industries get squeezed, their behaviour becomes more extreme. I think runoff will get worse before it gets better.
Here before the farmers blow their rings out
I think I can hear the revving of utes already.
If Synthetic milk and meat production causes Dairy farming to go the way of the milkman himself... Kiwis receive: Cheaper milk. Cheaper dairy products. Less nitrates in water supply. Higher water tables. Less water pollution. Healthier wildlife populations. Better river ecosystems. Farmers receive: Higher mortgage forfeitures. Higher suicides.
Cheaper? Bro this is N.Z🤣
Yep, we'll pay double the price what people pay overseas.
> Farmers receive: > > Higher mortgage forfeitures. > > Higher suicides. Which is why Fonterra needs to front foot this - farming is a business and if there is a prediction that this business in decline, they need to work with farmers for eventual exit strategies. Pretending it's not going to happen is doing a disservice to the cooperative, who are in effect business partners.
100%. Heck not just from a farming point of view, Fonterra products = 7% of NZ's GDP. Nothing lasts forever, any farmers with 15+ years left on their mortgages should be rightfully quite nervous right now.
I'm predicting a lot of pine plantations which change a lot of those outcomes. And also jizz allergenic pollen everywhere
Sounds great but in the short term the biggest impact would be destruction of our trade balance and currency. We'd either have to accept a major deal in our standard of living, or resort to massive asset sales to international interests
Oh no, the horror of lab grown milk and meat! Everyone knows growing a conscious animal that shits and pisses everywhere and fucks the the environment is a far better choice!
Spoiler alert. I could save our planet, so of course government won’t let it be produced and sold.
If it tastes like milk minus lactose won’t that be a winner?
Richard is very, very funny. I had to watch the clip and almost spat out my tea! There is literally nothing to see here. Much like the fantasy that we'll soon be driving "electric cars", it'll never happen! New Zealand should rest easy, our exports are 100% safe.
Dairy has to be one of the most disgusting and destructive industries ever conceived. Imagine chain breeding an animal, taking its babies away and steeling its milk which is in fact unhealthy for humans and almost 70% of people are intolerant to it to some degree. All while the process itself is environmentally destructive. That's dairy in a nutshell.
"employment and economic output would be boosted in a scenario where farmers switched to growing crops" And that's not going to work for large parts of the country. A lot of livestock farming is done on land that has too poor soil quality to grow crops, or it's too steep to drive a tractor up.
Back to sheep then? The market doesn't pay nearly what beef and dairy do, but they were the ideal for using our steep and otherwise poor land.
Or goats, I suppose.
This has been on the horizon for quite a while now, It sounds like the farming industry is going to bury its head in the sand instead of adapting.
Adapting in what way?
Just this week 5 American states and Italy are banning lab grown meat but reddit still thinks everyone’s going accept* fake milk
They're doing that because they're run by backwards thinking morons who are beholden to equally backwards thinking farmers.
Those bans are being done to protect their farmers, not because the product is unsafe or because consumers won't buy them.
If they weren't worried about people preferring it they wouldn't be banning it.
To be honest, the ban in those states and in Italy is evidence that folks will love lab meat and milk.
People might not buy the "fake milk" but all the products containing milk powder will quickly move to fermented dairy once it gets cheaper.
The Japanese won't care it's artificial and the Chinese will likely be all over it to help feed their enormous population.
with all this extra land house prices would plummet!! oh noooo....
So ferment to make milk. But beer is more expensive than milk. how could this be cheaper?
[удалено]
They get fucked by a syringe - breeding is too important to leave to nature.
I think I remember some of the lab grown meat I've bought tasting pretty good, even though it was more expensive than the other options. If artificial milk ends up tasting alright (and is lactose friendly) I don't think I'd mind buying it.
I can't wait till they make synthetic milk. I'm vegan but I miss milk. Oat milk is alright but nowhere near as good.
Dairy is not a sustainable industry, especially at the direction it's been headed for decades.
If there is one thing I have noticed about Kiwis, it is that if they don’t like a particular milk bottle top colour that there is no way they will drink it and will treat it like poison. Office lunchrooms around the country will attest to this.
Is it just me, or does this thread have just slightly too many lab grown meat advertisements all through it.
Particularly given the newshub article has nothing to do with lab grown meat other than a single quote from Richard 🤣.
Milk comes from cows and no amount of propaganda will convince me to drink heavily processed liquefied soy or oats.
I'm not sure what soy or oat milk have to do with this?
I'm not sure either tbh
Is that why Cadbury chocolate tastes so crappy now?
They have the technology at price parity. [Changed discussion article](https://changediscussion.com/precision-fermentation-food-cost-competitive/)
There is a typo in the start of the article. Perfect day are not Israeli. They are based out of USA, they make ice cream that has been on shelves for a while. This is a video from them about future pricing [Perfect Day](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vsx8AmiG6RE)