The climate impact and land use of cultivated meat: Evaluating agricultural feedstock production

The results showed differences in land use efficiency across the four scenarios. Scenario 1, which involved maximum CM production without solar panel energy and includes the extrac- tion of all nutrients from the crops, had the highest efficiency of 1,785.16 kg/ha. Scenario 2, which added solar panels to the mix, showed a slightly lower efficiency of 1,727.14 kg/ha. Sce- narios 3 and 4, which sourced nutrients only from respective protein and glucose plants, had efficiencies of 1,378.28 kg/ha and 1,378.28 kg/ha respectively. With scenarios 3 and 4, the pro- duction was inhibited by amino acid availability, more precisely by the lack of availability of lysine and alanine. Table 7 lists results of various LCAs to calculate a corrected area efficiency to fit various assumption of the observed LCAs. We used a carcass yield of 79% following Reckmann et al. (2013) [98]. On average, pork production also needs more land per kilogram than CM production look- ing at existing LCAs. Therefore, we can generally report slightly higher land use performance for CM which was also reported in aforementioned LCAs. To calculate the carbon cost of consumption, which are the sum of production emissions and carbon opportunity cost [68], we used production emissions per area for the crops that are used to create the pig feed concentrates and the cell medium for each of the four scenarios. The results are shown in Table 8. Given the land use requirements for feed and cell mediums, we calculate the total production emissions per area. This result is combined with the output

per area to derive the feed concentrate and cell medium production emissions. Regarding energy use, for pigs we use data based on Wirsenius et al. (2020) [105]. Manure management and enteric fermentation numbers for the pig farm are from Wirsenius et al. (2020) [105]. For CM, we assume no emissions in these two categories. All four mentioned categories of produc- tion emissions make up the total production emissions. Besides production emissions, we con- sider the carbon opportunity cost to quantify the carbon cost of consumption [68] for meat from pigs and the various CM scenarios. Fig 1. Crop rotation for maximum cell media production in the four scenarios. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0316480.g001 PLOS ONE Evaluating agricultural feedstock for cultivated meat PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0316480 January 22, 2025 16 / 27