Is emerging cellular agriculture an extension of farming? Or is it a replacement for farming?  An extension of farming – grain to beer – is an economic complement.  A farm replacement – meat and dairy protein from tanks – is an economic substitution.  What is the role of the farming industry in the industrialization of cellular agriculture.

ERS reported, in Economics of Cellular Agriculture, that over 80 percent of proposed rule respondents reported cell cultured food should be lab-raised.  This chart summarizes the farm enterprises currently utilizing microbial processes to deliver their farmed products.  These are some of the same fermentation processes being industrialized and commercialized in cellular agriculture.

The level of management intensity is higher in the lab-raised version of these microbial processes.  But aquaculture manages the fluids and gas exchange more intensively than terrestrial (non-aquatic) crops and livestock.  The production sector and USDA, 2023 Census of Aquaculture, comfortably claim intensively managed fish, shellfish, crustaceans, alligators, algae, and microalgae produced in tanks as farmed products.

US Farms are already producing intensively managed fungi and algae in environmentally controlled facilities, 2022, Census of Agriculture, Volume 1, Table 39. Floriculture and Bedding Crops, Nursery Crops, and Propagative Materials.

Today’s chart has six current microbe-dependent farm technologies listed.  Perhaps farm-raised fermentation will become the ‘natural’ process, while more intensively managed cellular culture will become a more ‘high volume/low cost’ process?  The six technologies listed here by farms reported in the 2022 Census of Agriculture, Volume 1, Table 48. They do not sum to the total.

• 870,000 Livestock and poultry farms all produce manure and nearly always rely on biological treatment to stabilize the carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium in the animal wastes.  Much of this manure is also land applied to soils below, but this is considered a separate technology.
• 570,000 Beef farms and dairy farms rely on beef and dairy cow rumens to microbially convert plant fiber to starches and sugars.  These rumen-derived, anaerobic ecosystems are the same process more intensively managed in farm manure digesters.  Also, there are 79,000 sheep and goat farms also rely on the rumen digestive systems of sheep and goats.  (US sheep farms was nearly exactly the same as the number of US goat farms).
• 262,000 farms apply manure nutrients to soil.  The topsoil contains the most active organic buffer.  Adding organic nutrients in manure, compost, or cover crops, enriches the soil organic matter physical, chemical, and biological buffer layer.
• 126,500 farms ferment haylage (like silage) out of alfalfa and grass.  The fermentation process breaks down the nutrients and also preserves the ruminant feed source.
• 40,800 farms produce silage from corn or grain sorghum for ruminant livestock.  Grain silage has more energy (sugar and starch) than the grass forage haylage.
• Finally, the US EPA reports 473 farm digesters in their AgSTAR digester database.

To get these very different farm numbers in a meaningful chart, the x-axis of farms is a logarithmic scale not a linear one.  As the numbers get larger the increments get closer together.

The farm community historically takes tractors and traditional equipment very seriously.  More recently, drones, variable rate applicators, and field maps have defined digital technology in production.  In the last few decades biotechnology and life science genetics have led the gains in both crops and livestock.

But these microbial, farm production technologies have long been an integral part of farm production.  Farm production is already dependent on cellular agriculture.

It is clear that the cellular replication technologies in cultured meat and even the biotechnology and fermentation processes of meat substitutes are very different than farm-based microbial cousins.  It is difficult to arbitrarily refer to beer brewers as farmers.  Brewers, after all, ferment farm commodities.  The emerging more intensively managed cellular agriculture will bypass the farm for food production.  In economic terms, grain producers complement beer brewers.  The cellular agricultural laboratories will substitute precision cell replication and fermentation for farm produced commodities.

In 20 years, these facilities will be more industrial than 2022 farms.  Will these new high tech cellular facilities replace farmed commodities?

There will 1) always be US farmers, just as 2) there will always be a demand for farm-raised commodities.  But now is the time for the farming community to plan for their contribution and discuss what is most valued, before the industries carve out their place in the food and fuel production industries.