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Alternative headline: Lab-grown milk substitutes a huge opportunity for NZ economy
Won’t China just make their own milk proteins, thereby decimating our dairy industry?
This tech will happen. Hopefully we can put our lands to better use.
Like crops? From the article:
While bad news for dairy, the study found employment and economic output would be boosted in a scenario where farmers switched to growing crops, which would also result in significant reductions in emissions and nutrient loss.
But I also think of NZ produce as being more premium. There will likely be room for lots of players in a market like that.
NZ does not chase the premium market in any product though. We don't sell premium cheese, premium milk, premium vegetables etc. We sell to the bidders in a global auction.
We absolutely sell in those markets. Grass fed beef and A2 milk are two examples. If you've been overseas, you can look for "New Zealand" on menus to see what's considered higher quality than a commodity.
What percent of our milk exports are A2 milk?
I don't know, but I don't think it matters. It's easy to switch to if your main market is taken up from lab milk, A2 and Fontera actually fought each other as Fonterra blocked them from encouraging farmers to breed A2 cows. If needed we could solve that.
But the point was you said we don't sell premium products which isn't true at all. And when lab milk takes over the bulk of dairy, there will still be global auctions for "real" cow milk, because there will still be a market for it.
I don’t know, but I don’t think it matters.
I think it does matter. It's illustrative of our market strategy as a nation.
But the point was you said we don’t sell premium products which isn’t true at all. And when lab milk takes over the bulk of dairy, there will still be global auctions for “real” cow milk, because there will still be a market for it.
Of course there will be a market. Just like there is a market today for V8 sedans. It's just the market is really small.
I will be very surprised if this change comes so fast we can't handle it like normal market changes.
I don't think we are handling normal market changes very well.
Probably, but that doesn't mean there will be no market for our product.
Maybe. There's a perception that sells a lot of NZ dairy in china, that NZ products are safer. Might apply to vat milk too.
Key sentence here
While bad news for dairy, the study found employment and economic output would be boosted in a scenario where farmers switched to growing crops, which would also result in significant reductions in emissions and nutrient loss.
So I see this as a win-win-win.
Another interesting point
"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.
Mr McIntyre is engaging in wishful thinking here, if the lab-grown alternative is half the cost, I'm sure parents will be only too happy to put it in the lunch boxes of the kids....some of the crap that gets put in now is amazing....
People are already putting in soy milk, almond milk, oat milk etc why wouldn't they put lab milk?
What a dork, of course they will come around. It may take some time and some convincing, but people will definitely accept this.
If only there wasn't a reason farmers are not doing more agriculture in the mountainous land of New Zealand.
Most of our mountainous land is protected. Even if it’s not, dairy farms aren’t being run on rugged terrain. Cows aren’t exactly known for their adventurism.
Interesting. I imagined it'd be similar to how things are run in Switzerland. Cows there are pretty adventurous I suppose.
Isn't Switzerland the place they keep the cows in a barn and grow the grass separate, then cut and feed the grass to the cows?
I think they also have much smaller herd sizes than NZ.
When I visited, I run into cows plenty of times while hiking the mountain trails. I can't speak with authority, but from what I was told is that there aren't many big dairy farms, most dairy farmers run small scale farms.
What, you haven't seen all of those videos of cows scaling cliffs like a goat?
I talked to a farmer on hill land about this, and he said they have to buy cows that have grown up on hill land otherwise they can’t handle it and invariably end up a bloated carcass in the local stream. That still does happen sometimes, in which case they just leave it there to decompose and pollute the stream because it’s too much work to remove it. Farmers, eh?
Well certainly not dairy farming.
I think if this becomes a reality we are entirely fucked, much as we were in the 1880s when wool prices collapsed and a decade of economic depression followed.
There were a whole bunch of incredibly large land holdings up to their eyeballs in debt that kind of just hobbled on for a while, but not able to actually adapt. Ultimately, the government implemented the land tax to break them up to make way for more productive activities on smaller farms. I see a few parallels here.
Maybe, but there is a massive opportunity here to transition to supplying feedstock.
Look forward 30-50 years, will there be any dairy farming at all if this tech is perfected?
Oh yeah for sure there is, but whether structurally, institutionally we'll actually do that in a proactive way, I'm not so sure. Dairy farms carry quite a lot of debt so their business models are pretty locked in to an extent.
I wonder when they say sugar as a feedstock, do they mean like sugarcane or is it any sort of crop given everything we eat breaks down into sugars in the end. I wish these articles would link the reports theyre reporting on..
Nowhere is NZ is warm enough for commercial sugarcane production, unfortunately.
Yet...? 😬
Theoretically, any feedstock that can be converted to sugar would work.
Bioreactors that take "waste" plant material and convert it to sugars have proved very difficult to perfect. There were a huge number tried when biodiesel was "the next big thing".... None became commercially viable, which is why biodiesel died....
I mean, if a countries economy hinges on the cruel realities of animal agriculture, and a cruelty free alternative takes over - either get with the times, or good riddance to that economy I say.
If you prefer not to drink dairy milk, then just skip milk entirely.
As an aside, we really shouldn’t be eating food created in a lab. We’ve evolved as a species over hundreds of thousands of years to eat real food and we keep trying and failing to outsmart evolution. Trans fats, artificial sweeteners, processed food, and so on.
Milk is an end product. Precise fermentation is a better technology to produce it than cows.
Better how? Certainly not more nutritious but having some new feature that adds convenience or uniformity. Processing always has side effects, usually discovered decades later. Trans fats, artificial sweeteners, refined grains, the list goes on.