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?
The final product is dried and harvested, with minimized water, land and energy use, Galy says.
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.
To make the Galy cotton, a team collects samples from a plant and harvests its cells. The cells are grown in bioreactor or fermentation vessels in a cell culture process similar to beer brewing. The final product is dried and harvested, with minimized water, land and energy use, Galy says.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.