this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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Theres a few metrics that are the only thing that matters here, and this doesnt have any of them. Thorough comparisons of water usage, carbon footprint, and land usage. A lab has a lot of extra things that go into its impact compared to plants just growing in soil. Its a whole ass building for one. Thats a lot of impact in construction and maintenance. Thats air conditioning and plumbing for employee needs, electricity needs, roads and parking lots, all of this is water and emissions impact. Dont forget that a plant growing is itself sequestering carbon, if this is less plant material than conventional growing, thats another impact. Ive got a whirlwind of concerns for this
Growing a plant is only useful for carbon sequestration if the resulting plant matter is sequestered. I would expect that the unused stalks of cotton plants get mulched back into the soil, which releases the carbon again in short order.
Ironically, lumber construction and large landfills are good ways to sequester carbon-rich plant material.
a portion of carbon in decomposing plants gets released as CO2, but the goal of composting, even ignoring emissions, is adding carbon and other nutrients into the soil in a solid form, to feed more plants. The fact that compost piles exist and dont just evaporate into nothingness means this is a net sequestering process.
The compost is put into the soil, which doesn't get significantly deeper over time as a result because the carbon does indeed eventually come out of it as CO2. It's a temporary storage spot at best. There are some biomes where the carbon does get sequestered long-term, such as peat bogs, anoxic lakebeds, and the ocean floor, but generally speaking most land biomes are carbon-neutral.
it doesnt all become CO2
The soil in modern industrial farming, which is frequently tilled and treated with pesticides, is typically very barren of the microorganisms amd fungal networks that help to sequester carbon for the long term. Even if some is still sequestered despite this, it's much worse at it than most other soil.
Farming cotton the traditional ways also requires buildings, just as a lab would, and heavy farm equipment (the use of wghich can also compact the soil to the further detriment of the microorganisms) that requires gasoline or lithium ion batteries made with cobalt from the congo.
Rural buildings and scattered land use are typically more disruptive to ecosystems than when human activity is concentrated to the smaller footpelrint of cities.
Labs can be put anywhere, whereas cotton farms are limited by space and climate to certain areas, so using labs in a variety of areas might mean much lower transporation costs and gasoline use between the cotton producer and the manfacturer that buys it.
Large scale farming also equals large scale deforestation, replacing complex ecosystems with monocultures that are routinely uprooted. This means both worse carbon sequestration and also worse stuctural cohesiveness of the soil (no roots and fungal networks holding it together), making areas more prone to landslides.
Also farms tend to pollute the groundwater all around them, and they displace native plants and thus also animals that depend on the native plants, such as the huge number of bee species that exclusively pollinate/feed from specific native plants.
Without a cotton farm, that area could potentially be a forest or natural field instead, which would be far and away better for carbon sequestration, maintaining biodiversity, and conservation.
Youre throwin out a lotta tangents there. Farming practices could be improved but this is strictly comparing between farmed cotton and lab grown. How good farmed soil is at sequestering carbon is being compared to no soil at all. Its commercial flooring over a concrete foundation. And theres not really any building required for growing cotton.
Vehicle emissions would be something to consider. Again, we dont have any metrics here, farm equipment is big because it is harvesting a lot of cotton. That brings down the emissions to cotton volume ratio, but i dont know what kind of numbers its going up against.
The rural thing sounds wrong, but its not specifically relevant anyway, a cotton farmer can live in a city, and cotton farms, for how much cotton they produce, might not be sprawling land use. Without knowing how much cotton per acreage lab grown cotton can produce, the farm might be the denser production use of land. We just use a lot of cotton. This may very well be wrong, we're just missing anything to compare. I am a big fan of nature, but for all the problems of modern farming practices, they are still planting plants, and im gonna need a lot of convincing that a lab can produce more efficiently than a plant.