Our current protein production process sucks — the food crisis
We have more people today than at any other point in history. That number isn’t stopping though, it is still growing at a rapid rate. We have approx. 7.8 billion people on Earth right now and by 2050 that number will be at approximately 10 billion!
I don’t know about you, but I think that. is. CRAZY! We have more people working on creating the next light bulb, which means we have so many new technological advancements. That's amazing 😍
The problem with this is that we will have 10 billion mouths to feed. This means we would have to DOUBLE the amount of food we have. Unfortunately, our current systems can’t sustain this.
Deeper dive into the problem
Our current systems for food production are super inefficient. With the growth of our population, climate change and so many more problems we need to make a change to the way we produce food.
Humans are incredibly inefficient in a lot of ways, but a huge problem is how we use water.
71% of our Earth is made of water. Of that 71%, only 2.5% of it is fresh. The rest of it is ocean water and saline. But what’s even crazier is that only 1% of our drinking water is accessible!
That's mind-blowing to me! Only 1% of Earth's water is fresh and accessible.
Okay, that's insane, but how does this relate to the food crisis?
Agriculture alone makes up 70% of the world’s food. And guess what how much of our fresh and accessible water goes towards this. 70%!!!!
There are an estimated 790 million people (11% of the world’s population) that lack access to clean water and an estimated 1.8 billion people (25% of the world’s population) without access to decent sanitation.
If so many people don’t have access to clean water and sanitation, why the heck is so much of our water being used in agriculture?!
Resources used to produce meat
With our current systems, it takes 2400 gallons of water to make 1 pound of meat. For context:
Yes, the diagram is correct. 1 pound of meat = 2400 gallons water = either 150 showers, 7 hot tubs or 20800 bottles of water.
To go even further, 1 cow is approx. 490 lbs of meat. That would mean that to farm a single cow you would need an Olympic size swimming pool. Not just one though, you would need 2!
Water isn’t the only inefficient thing about our current meat production process though. We are also so bad at using our land!
29% of our Earth is land. Of that, only 21% is habitable land. Of that 21% of land half of it (10.5%) is used for agriculture, the other half is forests and other things like mountains. This means we live on 0.3% of Earth's land and agriculture takes up 10.5% of it.
We are overpopulating our Earth and running out of space. But we have so much land available to us. It is just going to the wrong things.
Not saying that agriculture is a bad use of land, its a great use of land. But 10.5% of our land shouldn’t be going to agriculture.
The last crazy inefficiency I’ll tell you about is the amount of food we use when farming cows.
If 100g of grain protein is consumed by a single cow, only 3% of it is maintained.
As of 2017, 1 in 9 people goes to bed hungry every night. That’ s 795 million people on Earth who suffer from chronic hunger. That isn’t all though. 1 in 3 people suffer from some form of malnutrition and every year, poor nutrition kills approx 3.1 million children under 5 y/o.
This is ridiculous, we have so many people going hungry but we are feeding cows a huge amount of food that they don’t even maintain!
Why do we need so many resources to farm cows?
Let's start with water. Because cows are so big, they have to eat a lot of food. Since cows are so bad at turning food into meat they are continually consuming a ton of it. More feed = more water consumption.
You obviously can’t stack cows on top of each other, so they need to be farmed vertically. They are also huge, so they need tons of space. You can have approximately 11 cows on 20 acres, which is 1.8 acres per cow. For context 1.32 acres = 1-foot ball field.
Lastly, we have food. Cows are horrible at turning feed into the meat so farmers have to feed them an immense amount of food for them to be able to produce a good amount of meat.
Carbon emissions
One-third of our greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture. Protein production releases large amounts of methane which is approx. 28x more powerful than CO2.
This is another huge problem with our current protein production systems.
Problem TLDR:
- To farm a single cow you need 2 Olympic swimming pools of water. This is because more feed = more water.
- Cows have to be farmed vertically and you can only have 11 cows on 20 acres because they are so big.
- Cows suck at turning feed into meat. The protein conversion rate in beef is 3%.
- Current protein production releases a large amount of methane and CO2.
Elon Musk plans to send a SpaceX rocket to Mars, with cargo only, by 2022, according to the SpaceX website. A second mission, which would take more cargo and crew, is targeted for 2024. Musk has also said he’ll send a million people to Mars by 2050. Since we have a few more years until we can even *possibly* go to mars, we need to do something about this horrible system we have. Let's look into what we are doing right now.
Existing Solutions for the food crisis
There are a few people working on ways to solve the food crisis, here are a few:
United Nations SGD Goals
Sustainability development goals (SGD) are a collection of 17 global goals. These are designed to be the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for humans. The SGDs were set in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly and the goal is to achieve them by 2030.
The goal of SDG #2 is to end hunger, achieve food security, improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.
United Nations is trying to achieve this through programmes that use food to build assets, spread knowledge and nurture stronger, more dynamic communities. This helps communities become more food secure.
For more information on SGD#2 check out this playbook!
AeroFarms
AeroFarms is trying to grow the best plants possible, inside! They provide perfect conditions for healthy plants to grow through indoor vertical farming. It has a minimal environmental impact and virtually zero risks.
For more information check out their website!
Soylent
Soylent is a plant-based, complete meal, with 26 added vitamins and minerals. They engineer their products to deliver nutrition when you need it. They have ready-to-drink meals, customizable powders and mini-bars.
Check them out here for more information!
Impossible Burger
Impossible Foods is making meat, dairy and fish from plants. Their mission is to make the global food system truly sustainable by eliminating the need to make food from animals.
More information on them here!
Beyond Meat
Beyond Meat is a producer of plant-based meat substitutes. They have products designed to simulate chicken, beef, and pork sausage.
For more information check out their website!
Problem with these solutions
All of these solutions are interesting and some have a decent impact, global hunger is still a problem. The sustainability parts of it are fairly decent, but some of them aren’t as nutritious as current beef burgers.
Overall, if these solutions worked, this article wouldn’t exist and neither would global hunger.
With all of these new solutions, we have 1.5x more food than we need, But 800M are still dying.
The solution of the future — Carbovore
I think there are 3 things that we have to focus on, these solutions don’t have all of them.
- Sustainable for the future
- Good nutrition
- Easy distribution & low cost
It has to be sustainable because if we continue with unsustainable systems we won’t have any resources to survive.
A lot of the existing solutions don’t have the same nutrition levels and some of them are worse, this is something that we have to keep in mind.
The last part is distribution and low cost. If we make a product that is super sustainable and nutritious but we can’t distribute it to the world then what is the point of it? We have to be super conscious about the price because if we make a super expensive but nutritious and sustainable product people will be less likely to buy it. Especially since a lot of people suffering from malnutrition are in 3rd world countries with not a lot of money.
Me and my Co-founder Adara Hagman are working on a solution that will hit all of these called Carbovore.
At Carbovore, we’re on a mission to create a carbon-neutral future for protein production by 2050. Our approach is to experiment with emerging technologies to create alternative protein production methods with a focus on creating closed-loop systems.
Bugriculture is our current focus for alternative protein production. This involves farming crickets and other insects. We are going to create The Carbovore Burger — a burger patty made from insects. Our main focus area for research and experimentation is carbon capture and recycling into protein products. Carbovore is creating protein products for the environmentally-conscious carnivore.
After doing a cost analysis 1 pound of meat from Carbovore would be $6, but once we start mass-producing our goal cost is $3. Right now, beyond meat and the impossible burger is $12 a pound!
For more information check out the dashboard with all our assets!
Article recap
- Our current protein production process sucks. We use an insane amount of water, land and food.
- Agriculture also contributes to 1/3 of our greenhouse gas emissions
- We have a few current solutions for example beyond meat, impossible burger and soylent but those haven’t stopped the problem
- In order to fix the problem, we need a sustainable, nutritious and easily distributed product. That’s where Carbovore comes in 😎
Check out our website for more:)
