Unsurprising! So I guess meat and dairy products are going to become astronomically expensive?
The one thing that I can’t find is a palatable alternative to cheese. Are there any yet?
Unsurprising! So I guess meet and dairy products are going to become astronomically expensive?
Alternative milks are currently more expensive than cow milk (by a long way). If that changes, I can see the dairy industry crashing.
The one thing that I can’t find is a palatable alternative to cheese. Are there any yet?
To be honest I haven’t tried any. But I know lab-grown “milk” is becoming a thing, if you’re after the same taste I’d guess that would be your best bet. Not sure if there are any yet.
Lab produced dairy will basically eliminate the dairy farm, once perfected the change will be swift and catastrophic.
2 to 3 years to design and build a plant, one reasonable sized facility will replace 60k cows, that is 20 big farms, 1000 hectares replaced by 4-10 hectares.
I think you need to make it cheaper than cow milk and taste pretty much the same, with a similar nutrient profile. There will still be holdouts but I think the cost thing will be the tipping point. Up until it’s the cheapest option, it’s still a premium product for a niche market. Once that tipping point is reached, I’d hate to be a dairy farmer.
Agreed, but once it is perfected, dairy industry has at most 5 years before basically their entire industry is vapor.
A lot of the tech from wine making will carry over; pumps, filters massive stainless steel vats and a lot of pipe…
If you could buy bio-equivalent milk for 1/4 the cost, would you keep buying the “natural” version?
The next question is what will happen when massive Chinese lab-milk factories replace NZ milk. They won’t need our exported milk, and this will be a huge issue for the economy given our reliance on exported dairy.
“LA LA LA LA LA LA I CANT HEAR YOU”.
– Dairy farmers probably.
Who knows, but maybe we move to different types of farms. Maybe replant some natives, or grow crops.
It will not be pretty, farmers will not do well out of it.
If there was a breakthrough tomorrow, in some lab somewhere. There would be a couple of years at pilot plant stage; kinda micro brewery size, to see if it can scale, then a couple more years at “small” industrial scale to ensure that all of the kinks are worked out. At that point you are at full commercialisation, 2 - 3 years to get a big plant running.
When a huge industry basically disappears overnight, the flow on impacts will be much wider than just to dairy farmers. Every motorbike and tractor salesman and mechanic, every agriculture specialist from banking to insurance to pasture to large animal vets and livestock agents. Virtually every small town held together by the business of the local farmers will turn into a block of the unemployed, eventually the towns will start to disappear.
Maybe these businesses will survive for a while as dairy blocks convert to sheep and beef, as many of the specialised industries that go along with dairy farms are similar. But this will cause an influx of meat in an industry that already has enough. And people are eating less meat.
If the government wants to cut the number of cattle we have, maybe the answer is to contribute to the lab-milk research to allow it to come about sooner.
