The End of Farming | Food Production and Preservation | Forums

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Modern biotechnology could put dairy farms out of business. And not just dairy, but lots of other farms as well, including those that produce meat, leather, and even staple starches. In fact, the amount of land devoted to agriculture could shrink by 80 percent in the next few decades.

In the mid-1960s, when I was growing up on a dairy farm in the Virginia Appalachians, there were3.2 million farms in the United States. About 600,000 of them produced some milk for sale. Nationally, there were just under 15 million milk cows, and dairy producing farms averaged about 20 milk cows per operation. (My family ran about 40 head of cows.) Fewer than 2 percent of dairy farms operated with more than 100 cows. Each cow produced a bit more than 8,000 pounds of milk per year, and the country consumed about 124 billion* pounds of milk annually.

By 2012, the number of farms with dairy cows had dropped to just over 50,000, and nearly 50 percent of cows lived on farms with more than 1,000 animals. The total number of milk cows dropped to 9.2 million, each producing about 22,000 pounds of milk per year. American consumption of milk had risen to about 200 billion* pounds annually. Dairy accounts for about 12 percent of all calories consumed by Americans annually.

Now the startup Muufri (pronounced moo-free) aims to use biotech to make perfect cow's milk. The lab-grown milk is a compound of six proteins and eight fatty acids. Cow genes are added to yeast grown in vats, from which those compounds are harvested. The company will add the proper proportions of minerals like calcium and potassium to the mixture. Muufri can leave out lactose, which 75 percent of the world's adults have trouble digesting.

http://reason.com/ar.....of-farming