this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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This article is very thin on the details. Why would anyone want to cultivate a plant in the lab that grows perfectly well in fields across multiple climate zones?
That's why. Cotton is notoriously bad in all of those categories. To that I would add the most cotton grown commercially is paired with a lot of pesticides as well.
From an EU briefing on textiles and the environment:
The huge quantities of land required should absolutely not be underestimated as a climate problem. If we're going to survive this we absolutely need to give land back to nature at a massive scale, and the easiest (humanely tolerable) way of achieving this is to produce the same goods at a much lesser surface area. Lab cotton could, hopefully, be efficiently grown in a high rise building with a minimal physical footprint.
Would be interesting to see how easily vacant office space can be converted to vertical farming, since developers seem insistent that it can't be turned into residential space for various reasons. There's rather a lot of it in the wake of work-from-home and the AI revolution.
You could imagine a feature where cities are farms and office workers live in the country side. That's fascinating.
While there are not many details this is hopefully a great step toward more efficient cotton production. There are a number of possible reductions from this method (hard to know without full details though), that being lower usage of land, water, pesticides, herbicides, and shipping.
Longer term what I find exciting is the some of these lab grown systems may work well "closed loop" which mean they might work off planet at some capacity or another. That is a much longer term vision though and we have a long way to go before we master that aspect.
I guess for water getting a closed loop should be almost without challenge. I'm more interested in the potential of making life livable on earth though, at least in the short term. Still, the requirements are similar - lowered use of resources. :)
Maybe I just misread the sentence. But the full quote seems deliberately obtuse to me. They don’t explicitly say that they need less water than traditional farming.
Cotton is one of the worst things to grow in 99% of the world yet we do it as a cash crop.
In Australia cotton farmers are turning rivers dry, and if you know Australia we don’t have much water to begin with.
the worlds fourth largest lake was almost entirely drained by cotton cultivation
I'm not up to speed on the environmental impact of cotton farming, but it would be pretty cool if this technology could be applied to stuff like the oil palm, which only grows in tropical areas.
In theory it could use far less land, water, fuel, and pesticides to achieve a similar output of a superior quality product, In theory. There's a lot of labor resources and energy that goes into growing cotton. You could likely replace many hundreds of acres of cotton fields with a modest factory on 20 acres of land.
Cotton requires a lot of water and is considered a high risk crop with climate change. There are already failing crops, and cotton takes long enough to establish that it's hard to adjust quickly. This is grown from cotton cells anywhere we can stand up a factory.
Cotton uses a ton of water, iirc.
Once we grow it in a lab we can control it a lot more. Maybe genetically engineer it to have different properties.
Space? Mars? Something like that, maybe?