Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

#RegenesisFact 8: Tomas Linder, associate professor of agricultural sciences, has compared the land area needed to grow protein through precision fermentation to the most efficient agricultural method, US soybean farming. The results are astonishing: 🧵

In a typical year, soybeans occupy 36.5m ha of the US, an area greater than Italy. The land required to produce the same amount of protein by growing bacteria is 21,000 ha: the size of the city of Cleveland, Ohio. In other words, you’d need 1,700 times less land to grow it.

The land-use ratio is even greater when you compare it to animal products, as you can see from this chart.

Chicken needs roughly 5,000x as much land as microbial protein
Pork 8,000x
Beef 126,000x
Lamb 142,000x

This is why I see the precision fermentation of microbes as the most important of all environmental technologies. It shrinks to a remarkable degree the amount of land we need to produce our food, as well as water, nutrients and many other inputs.

Land use, I believe, is the most important of all environmental metrics. The land we use for extractive industries, of which farming uses by far the most, is land that can’t be used for ecologically- and carbon- rich ecosystems: wild forests, wetlands, savannahs etc

We'd still need processing facilities. But the same applies to processing soya and, to a much greater extent, live and dead animals. While fossil fuel use is greatly reduced, more electricity is needed, for hydrogen consumed by hydrogen-oxygenating bacteria. Figures follow

If solar power, a land-hungry form of power generation, is used, producing bacterial protein requires between 30 and 60x less land than soy protein. If onshore wind power were used instead, it’s between 150 and 400 times less land. Offshore still less (seabed in this case).

If the hydrogen were produced by 4th-generation nuclear reactors, the space required would be much smaller still. Solid oxide electrolysers, high-temp steam electrolysis or thermochemical cracking of water using concentrated solar or SMRs would all further reduce the land take.

As grazing occupies two-thirds of agricultural land, and grains grown to feed animals or protein- and oil- crops for humans account for much of the rest, this could allow land sparing on an otherwise unimaginable scale.

I believe that this technology, more than perhaps any other, could enable us to survive the 21st Century and those that follow, as the rewilding it permits could stop the 6th Great Extinction in its tracks, while drawing down much of the CO2 we’ve already released.

Obviously, we ALSO need to decarbonise our economies, as quickly as possible. But precision fermentation helps here too, as it would greatly reduce the enormous carbon, methane and nitrous oxide emissions from food and farming.

I forgot to use Tomas's twitter handle, sorry: @yeastgenomix

Sources: i. Tomas Linder, 2019. Edible Microorganisms – An Overlooked Technology Option to Counteract Agricultural Expansion. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, volume 3, pp. 32. doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.…

ii. Our World in Data, 2018. Land use per 100 grams of protein. ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-u…

iii. Bart Pander et al., 2020. Hydrogen oxidising bacteria for production of single-cell protein and other food and feed ingredients. Engineering Biology, volume 4, issue 2, pp. 21-24. doi.org/10.1049/enb.20…

iv. Claudia Hitaj, 6 February 2017. Energy Consumption and Production in Agriculture. US Department of Agriculture (USDA), Economic Research Service. ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/20…

v. P.J. Gerber et al, 2013. Tackling climate change through livestock: A global assessment of emissions and mitigation opportunities. Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, Rome. fao.org/3/i3437e/i3437…

vi. Antti Nyyssölä et al., 2021. Production of Endotoxin-Free Microbial Biomass for Food Applications by Gas Fermentation of Gram-Positive H2-Oxidizing Bacteria. American Chemical Society (ACS) Food Science & Technology, volume 1, issue 3, pp. 470-479. doi.org/10.1021/acsfoo…

vii. Marja Nappa et al., 2020. Solar-Powered Carbon Fixation for Food and Feed Production Using Microorganisms – A Comparative Techno-Economic Analysis. American Chemical Society (ACS) Omega, volume 5, issue 51, pp. 33242-33252. doi.org/10.1021/acsome…

viii. Deepak Yadav and Rangan Banerjee, 2020. Net energy and carbon footprint analysis of solar hydrogen production from the high-temperature electrolysis process. Applied Energy, volume 262, pp. 114503. doi.org/10.1016/j.apen…

ix. Farid Safari and Ibrahim Dincer, 2020. A review and comparative evaluation of thermochemical water splitting cycles for hydrogen production. Energy Conversion and Management, volume 205, pp. 112182. doi.org/10.1016/j.enco…

x. Seyed Ehsan Hosseini and Mazlan Abdul Wahid, 2019. Hydrogen from solar energy, a clean energy carrier from a sustainable source of energy. International Journal of Energy Research, volume 44, issue 6, pp. 4110-4131. doi.org/10.1002/er.4930