Thread by @Joelscotthalkes

Here's a surprising reason to be cheerful:

🟢40-60% of the weight of a slaughtered cow goes to making ground beef...

... and ground beef is by far the easiest meat product to replace with precision fermentation or cultivated meat.

Short 🧵 1/
beefcentral.com/wp-content/upl… #vegan

The #climate wrecking livestock industry is barely profitable as it is.

Globally it is propped up by much of the $540bn spent on #agriculture subsidies per year.

In the UK 90% of an average livestock farm's profits come from subsidies.

2/

With such tight margins, farmers have to sell every single part of a cow for the numbers to add up. This is known as the 'carcass balance'.

So, if that 40-60% of the carcass balance is replaced, the business model of farming and killing these sentient beings collapses.

3/

Even if 1/2 of the ground beef market is lost, farming a cow simply won't be economic without raising prices. With raised prices comes falling demand, with falling demand comes more prices hikes.

This could, as Rethink X says, send livestock farming into a death spiral.

4/

Although cultured #meat companies are struggling to produce the texture of muscle (steak, chicken breast etc) at scale, precision fermentation companies have unlocked the biological keys to make the proteins and fats to create ground beef analogues.

5/

paleo-taste.com

Precision fermentation (PF) is already producing bio-identical dairy products such as Perfect Day milk and Brave Robot ice cream which are on sale in the US.

PF also produces almost all the insulin and rennet in the world.

5/
braverobot.co/pages/process

So once PF ground beef reaches the market, it really could be the start of livestock farming's death spiral.

Livestock farming is the single most destructive industry in human history. It uses 28% of the planets surface. It's time to end it, and #rewild the land instead.

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