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

This is due to the additional land that solar panels would require. Since land use is a critical determinant of the climatic impact of pork (up to 75%) [105], substantial environmental bene- fits from CM in this aspect cannot be readily anticipated when agricultural feedstock is used. Also, for the carbon cost of consumption (production emissions and carbon opportunity cost) there is only a limited advantage of the considered CM scenarios in comparison to pig farming in Germany. In previous LCAs Sinke et al., 2023 brings up freed up land, which can only be realized if precision fermentation is employed as they use 25% for media production through biotechnology and 75% amounts of amino acids through soy hydrolysate which again on a global scope would not reflect a sustainable crop rotation [41]. As a consequence, public and private research needs to focus on CM production systems where proteins for cell media feed- stock are produced through synthetic processes independent from agricultural products, like precision fermentation [61, 70]. Precision fermentation is essential for supplying nutrients to CM bioreactors, but scaling this technology presents major obstacles. Global fermentation capacity is currently inadequate to meet future demands, and engineering highly productive, robust microbial strains remains complex and costly [109]. Production costs are still too high, and significant regulatory hurdles persist, although they are somewhat less severe than those for CM [110]. Ensuring the purity of amino acids for bioreactor use is another challenge, particularly

when crop-based substrates require extensive refinement, potentially leading to higher cost in precision fermentation [111, 112]. Additionally, fermentation and chemical processes are water-intensive, complicating sustainability efforts [41]. Fig 2. Boxplots of land use efficiency for previous cultivated meat LCAs, pork production LCAs, and cultivated meat scenarios from this study. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0316480.g002 PLOS ONE Evaluating agricultural feedstock for cultivated meat PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0316480 January 22, 2025 18 / 27