Culture Clash? What Cultured Meat Could Mean for UK Farming: Using Waste or By-Products, 2022-2024

One of the most promising opportunities for linking farming with cultured meat production is using farm waste or by-products as ingredients. This is just one way the two industries could complement each other, and our preliminary findings suggest it is worth exploring.
Economic Impact: The cost of the pharmaceutical-grade ingredients used in growth media, particularly amino acids, is a major barrier to affordable cultured meat. We wanted to explore whether there were viable alternatives from the farming sector which are currently going to waste. The sources we looked at are oilseed rape meal, hoof and horn meal and bovine blood.
The results suggest that using agricultural feedstocks for media preparation could be cheaper than DMEM, and that large savings are potentially available from using food or feed grade sources.
Environmental Impact: As well as lowering the cost of production, could using agricultural waste or by-products reduce the environmental footprint of cultured meat? DMEM accounts for more than half the impact of cultured meat across most categories, including water consumption and global warming potential. So, reducing the impact of DMEM could substantially reduce the impact of the finished product. We analysed the ‘cradle-to-gate’ life-cycle impact of the cultured meat produced with the same alternative formulations. This includes factors such as energy, scaffold material and oxygen, but does not include building construction or equipment manufacturing. We assumed that 140 litres of growth medium would be needed per kilogram of cultured meat.
The impact of baseline DMEM was set at maximum (100%). The impact of the other media were lower, with alternative ingredients outperforming the baseline DMEM across all impact areas. While this suggests it is worth investigating further, it is important to keep in mind that the data we used came from a range of different sources,
and have not all been tested experimentally.