Food & Agriculture - How will the disruption play out?

The Disruption of Food & Agriculture

During the 2020s, key technologies will converge to completely disrupt the foundational sectors that underpin the global economy; energy, transport and food & agriculture, and with them every major industry in the world today. The knock-on effects for society will be as profound as the extraordinary possibilities that emerge.

• The disruption of food and agriculture is inevitable – modern products will be cheaper and superior in every conceivable way. 
• The food & agriculture disruption is primarily a protein disruption driven by economics. 
• Modern foods will be superior in every key attribute – more nutritious, healthier, better tasting, and more convenient, with almost unimaginable variety.
• By 2030, modern food products will be higher quality and cost less than half as much to produce as the animal-derived products they replace.
• The impact of this disruption on industrial animal farming will be profound.
  • By 2030, the number of cows in the U.S. will have fallen by 50% and the cattle farming industry will be all but bankrupt. 
  • All other livestock industries will suffer a similar fate, while the knockon effects for crop farmers and businesses throughout the value chain will be severe.
  • This is the result of rapid advances in precision biology that have allowed us to make huge strides in precision fermentation, a process that allows us to program microorganisms to produce almost any complex organic molecule.
  • These advances are now being combined with an entirely new model of production we call Food-as-Software, in which individual molecules engineered by scientists are uploaded to databases – molecular cookbooks that food engineers anywhere in the world can use to design products in the same way that software developers design apps.
  • This model ensures constant iteration so that products improve rapidly, with each version superior and cheaper than the last. It also ensures a production system that is completely decentralized and much more stable and resilient than industrial animal agriculture, with fermentation farms located in or close to towns and cities.
• As the most inefficient and economically vulnerable part of this system, cow products will be the first to feel the full force of modern food’s disruptive power.
  • The industrial livestock production model has all but reached its limits in terms of scale, reach, and efficiency.
  • The whole of the cow milk industry will start to collapse once modern food technologies have replaced the proteins in a bottle of milk – just 3.3% of its content. The industry, which is already balancing on a knife edge, will thus be all but bankrupt by 2030.

• • The disruption will play out in a number of ways and does not rely solely on the direct, one-for-one substitution of end products. In some markets, only a small percentage of the ingredients need to be replaced for an entire product to be disrupted.

• Modern alternatives will be up to 100 times more land efficient, 10-25 times more feedstock efficient, 20 times more time efficient, and 10 times more water efficient. They will also produce an order of magnitude less waste.
• This is not, therefore, one disruption, but many in parallel... Each overlapping, reinforcing, and accelerating one another...

Key Implications of this Disruption

Economic

• Modern foods will cost 50%-80% less than the animal products they replace, this translates into lower prices and increased disposable incomes.
• Revenues of the U.S. beef & dairy industry and their suppliers (which together exceed $400bn today) will decline by at least 50% by 2030, and by nearly 90% by 2035. All other livestock and commercial fisheries will follow a similar trajectory.
• The volume of crops needed to feed cattle in the U.S. will fall by 50%
• Countries that produce large quantities of conventional animal products and inputs to animal farming like Brazil, where more than 21% of GDP comes from agriculture – 7% of which is from livestock alone – are particularly vulnerable.
• The average U.S. family will save more than $1,200 a year in food costs. This will keep an additional $100bn a year in Americans’ pockets by 2030. 
• By 2030, at least half of the demand for oil from the U.S. agriculture industry – currently running at about 150 million barrels of oil equivalent a year – will disappear as all parts of the supply chain related to growing and transporting cattle are disrupted.

• By 2035, 60% of the land currently used for livestock and feed production will be freed for other uses
• If all this freed land were dedicated to reforestation (utilizing tree species and planting techniques to maximize carbon sequestration) all current sources of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions could be fully offset by 2035.
• U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from cattle will drop by 60% by 2030, on course to nearly 80% by 2035. When the modern food production that replaces animal agriculture is included, net emissions from the sector as a whole will decline by 45% by 2030, on course to 65% by 2035.
• Water consumption in cattle production and associated feed cropland irrigation will fall by 50% by 2030, on course to 75% by 2035. Even when the modern food production that replaces animal agriculture is included, net water consumption in the sector as a whole will decline by 35% by 2030, on course to 60% by 2035.

Social

• Higher quality, more nutritious food will become cheaper and more accessible for everyone. In the developing world in particular, access to cheap protein will have a hugely positive impact on hunger, nutrition, and general health.
• Half of the 1.2 million jobs in U.S. beef and dairy production and their associated industries will be lost by 2030, climbing towards 90% by 2035.
• The U.S. precision fermentation industry will create at least 700,000 jobs by 2030 and up to one million jobs by 2035.

• Trade relations will shift because decentralized food production will be far less constrained by geographic and climatic conditions than traditional livestock farming and agriculture.
• Major exporters of animal products (i.e U.S., Brazil & EU) will lose geopolitical leverage over countries that are currently dependent upon imports of these products. Countries importing animal products can more easily produce these products domestically at a lower cost using modern production methods.
• The trillion dollar global opportunity exists for any country to capture, as large endowments of arable land and other natural resources are not required to lead the disruption

Read in more detail about the implications of the food & agriculture disruption on p40-57 of our Rethinking Food & Agriculture report.

Choices for Decision Makers

Our research is a call to leaders across society – public and private – to see what is really happening, to understand the implications, and to redefine the way we all do business, invest, and organize society.

• The choices decision makers take in the near term will have a lasting impact – those regarding IP rights and approval processes for modern food products, for example, will be critical.
• Decisions may be driven by economic advantages, social and environmental considerations, by incumbent industries seeking to delay or derail the disruption. or by mainstream analysis, although decisions made based on such analysis tend to make economies and societies poorer by locking them into assets, technologies, and skill sets that are uncompetitive, expensive, and obsolete.
• To unlock the full potential of this and every other technological disruption, we need to embrace a different approach that better reflects the complex, dynamic, and rapidly-changing world we live in. 
• Decision-makers must also recognize there are no geographical barriers to the food and agriculture disruption; any nation can capture the health, wealth, and jobs that accrue to those leading the way
• Policymakers must start planning for the modern food disruption now in order to capture the extraordinary economic, social, and environmental benefits it has to offer.
  
  

But this future is by no means predetermined. Indeed it cannot be achieved by technological progress alone

The intervening decade will be turbulent, destabilized both by technology disruptions that upend the foundations of the global economy and by system shocks from pandemics, geopolitical conflict, natural disasters, financial crises, and social unrest that could lead to dramatic tipping points for humanity including mass migrations and even war. In the face of each new crisis we will be tempted to look backward rather than forward, to mistake ideology and dogma for reason and wisdom, to turn on each other instead of trusting one another.

If we hold strong, we can emerge together to create the wealthiest, healthiest, most extraordinary civilization in history. If we do not, we will join the ranks of every other failed civilization for future historians to puzzle over. Our children will either thank us for bringing them an Age of Freedom, or curse us for condemning them to another dark age. The choice is ours.

Read in more detail about the choices decision makers can take on p58-63 of our Rethinking Food & Agriculture report.

Read the RethinkX 2020-2030 Action Plan for the future on p67-74 of our Rethinking Humanity Report.

Published on: 12/07/23