Dramatic world population growth – one of the biggest problems the agriculture industry is currently facing. Every single week, an average of 1.5 million people are being born, which equates to an increase of 80 million in population size annually. This means that the current methods we use to grow and produce food are bound to become not efficient enough to sustain the growing food demands of the global population. In order to solve this issue, we must incentivize agriculture technology startups to continue working on innovations and AgTech that will increase yield sizes, allow farmers to plant and harvest crops more easily and most importantly, improve sustainability so that professional growers would be able to work in smaller fields, but gather the same or higher volumes of produce. Agriculture technology is bound to be the solution that will help us achieve these objectives…or will it? The answer is quite obvious – yes, the only rational answer is to improve food production and AgTech is the most optimal option because it makes a direct impact. However, agriculture technology isn’t necessarily related to just farming – it can be used on the produce itself. This grows the potential of producing food (e.g. meat) using new AgTech innovations that will make the need to harm animals completely redundant. Let’s talk about it!

Using AgTech to Manufacture Cultured Meat

I know what you’re thinking. What in the world does “Cultured Meat” mean? In simple terms, it is meat that is created from performing muscle biopsy (a process where muscle tissue is extracted from an organism) and manufactured in a laboratory. This technology presupposes that the need for animal slaughter or any other type of animal harm can be avoided. The only thing that needs to be done to have the ability to grow artificial meat is to perform muscle cell extraction – that’s good news for animals because the procedure is completely painless. The very first cultured burger was manufactured in 2013 by Mark Post. From that time going forward, scientists have been working hard to make the technology better in order to have the ability to produce meat from all kinds of animals including chickens and pigs.

What Is The Process of Manufacturing Lab-Grown Meat Using AgTech

The process of creating cultivated meat revolves around 4 sections:

1. Cell Placement and Isolation (done during the biopsy process)
2. Cell Proliferation (the goal of this is to grow more muscle cells)
3. Fusion and Separation (starves muscle cells to change their structure)
4. Mixing and Polishing (mixing muscle cells with fat cells to resemble meat)

The idea behind these processes is to replicate the texture, taste and nutritional value of normal meat. This gives consumers the sensation they normally experience by eating a normal beef burger or any other meat product. The idea of manufactured meat might seem daunting at first and there are a lot of negative (uneducated) opinions in terms of the effect on human health that this new approach will impose. However, the constant need to feed livestock with antibiotics and other medicine that prevents disease will not be needed – this will be one of the biggest health benefits of consuming lab-grown meat. On top of that, the cost and scale of this technology have immense potential as we will have the luxury to not depend on constantly growing cattle.