Bill Gates and the NextGen FutureCow
Back in 2014 I realized I was not a wordsmith:
The White House Is Searching for the NextGen Futurecow (MOO)
Nextgen futurecow is probably as close to a neologism as I'm ever going to get....
(cue deep mournful lowing)
Nope, not a Shakespeare with his 422 brand-spanking-new words and the 1300 other words he raised from obscurity. So it goes. (cue deep mournful lowing)
From Wired UK, May 25:
The hunt for the master cow that will feed the world
Researchers are racing to find the cow cells that will make up tomorrow’s burgers, but in the secretive world of cultured meat, no one wants to share....
Emphasis in the originalAnd the latest, from NewScientist, May 9:
Lab-grown meat could be 25 times worse for the climate than beef
Analysis finds the carbon footprint of cultivated meat is likely to be higher than beef if current production methods are scaled up because they are still highly energy-intensive
Meat produced from cultured cells could be 25 times worse for the climate than regular beef unless scientists find ways to overhaul energy-intensive steps in its production.
Lab-grown or “cultivated” meat is made by growing animal stem cells around a scaffold in a nutrient-rich broth. It has been proposed as a kinder and greener alternative to traditional meat because it uses less land, feed, water and antibiotics than animal farming and removes the need to farm and slaughter livestock, …
which are a major source of greenhouse gases.
However, Derrick Risner at the University of California, Davis, and his colleagues found that the global warming potential of cultivated meat, defined as the carbon dioxide equivalents emitted for each kilogram of meat produced, is 4 to 25 times higher than for regular beef.The researchers conducted a life-cycle assessment of cultivated meat that estimated the energy used in each step in current production methods. They predict that this will be similar regardless of which animal’s cells are being cultivated.
They found that the nutrient broth used to culture the animal cells has a large carbon footprint because it contains components like sugars, growth factors, salts, amino acids and vitamins that each come with energy costs....
....MUCH MORE
Here's the preprint of the paper via the BioRxive, posted April 21:Environmental impacts of cultured meat: A cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment
Mr. Gates also makes investments in real cows:
Bill Gates’ investment in 'super cows' shows that many of the world’s farms are in crisis mode
"If you care about the poor, you should care about agriculture. And if you care about agriculture, you care about livestock," he told an audience at the University of Edinburgh. "What that means in this context is helping poor farmers get as much as possible out of their animals."And if I were a betting man I'd bet that the two strains of investment have already met and intermingled.
As well as farmland:
"North Dakota Attorney General's Office Looks into Bill Gates-Related Farmland Sale"
From AgWeek, June 22, 2022:
The North Dakota Attorney General’s office is asking Red River Trust, a Washington-based entity with offices in the Kansas City, Kansas, area, and an address at Grafton, North Dakota, to prove that it doesn’t violate anti-corporate farming laws, which would require it to sell land it purchased from owners of Campbell Farms of Grafton.
The North Dakota Attorney General’s office is looking into a land transaction between a prominent Grafton, North Dakota, potato farming family and a trust associated with billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
In a letter dated June 21, 2022, and addressed to the Red River Trust, care of trustee Peter Headley, in the trust’s Lenexa, Kansas, office, and also at an office in Grafton, North Dakota, where Campbell Farms is headquartered and still operates, the attorney general’s office notified the trust that all corporations or limited liability companies are “prohibited from owning or leasing farmland or ranchland in the state of North Dakota,” and from “engaging in farming or ranching.”....
....MUCH MORE
