New Technologies Make Factory Farming More Palatable. That’s Not Good Enough.

Innovation and technology are doing big things for animal welfare and the health of the planet. Meatless burgers from companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are now mainstream in a way few could have imagined 20 or 30 years ago. Fermentation is being used to make dairy products without using cows. Scientists are exploring the use of cell-cultured meat as a potential climate-friendly source of nutrition for humans. We’re watching in real time as new technology makes it easier and more palatable for people to buy fewer animal products, especially those that come from factory farming.

On the other hand, we’re also witnessing some stunningly nonsensical uses of technology in service of maintaining the status quo. Rather than radically changing the way we eat or the way our food systems work, time and money are being poured into efforts to greenwash or humane-wash industrial animal agriculture. But with a system as destructive as ours, there’s no simple fix. Most one-off proposals for changing the industry are just a distraction for the environmentally-minded while the industry buys time.

One tack that some inventors are taking is to make cows release less methane when they pass gas by changing what they eat. On its surface, it may sound appealing; if feeding cows differently can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we can slow the progression of climate change without changing our eating habits. It makes sense that fast food chains like Burger King would experiment with “reduced methane emissions beef” by adding lemongrass to cow feed. After all, no corporation wants to take a major hit to their sales due to consumers’ concerns for the planet. There’s a lot of excitement about new evidence that a food supplement of red algae could reduce bovine methane by over 80%, and big funding is going to startups that are working on turning the idea into practice.

But like most things that sound too good to be true, it probably is. Even if the worldwide agriculture does start adding red algae to cow feed, it would only address a small slice of the problem. To alter cows’ diets on a large scale, the algae would need to be used on feedlots, where cows spend their final months before slaughter. There, cows are crowded together and typically fed commercially-produced grain in a concentrated space.

The thing is, cows on feedlots already have a reduced methane output. Eighty-nine percent of a cow’s lifetime methane emissions come from the process of digesting grass, leaves, and other roughage during its time on the pasture. It’s not practicable to get grazing cows to eat red algae—they just don’t like it. Even if they did, we don’t understand the science of gut microbiomes well enough to understand the long-term effects of the red algae. It’s possible that cows’ digestive systems would adapt and return to producing high amounts of methane anyway. On top of all that, there are still a lot of uncertainties about building a supply chain that would support algae additives to cattle food on a massive scale.

As another way to reduce methane emissions from cows, some researchers are working on a vaccine that could cause cows to generate antibodies to methane-producing. In theory, the vaccine could be given to cows on pasture. But this presents a whole host of challenges. For starters, the vaccine must only target the microbes that make methane, not the other microbes that help cows digest grass. And then there’s the fact there will need to be high enough numbers of antibodies without the cow needing a cumbersome number of shots. As Jeremy Hill, chair of the Pastoral Greenhouse Gas Research Consortium and chief science and technology officer for Fonterra, tells Fast Company reporter Adele Peters, “a viable vaccine has thus far remained elusive.”

One outside-the-box solution has gotten some traction lately. A group of students and alumni of the Royal College of Art have developed a mask for cows that turns the methane from their belches into CO2 and water vapor. They recently received a £50,000 grant from Prince Charles and Sir Jony Ive, former chief design officer at Apple.

Setting aside what wearing a mask would feel like for cows—would it just be a new form of cruelty?—it’s hard to believe that this idea is scalable. We would need to produce, deliver, and place 1.5 billion masks on the world’s 1.5 billion cow snouts. Seems unlikely. And don’t get me started on the creative solutions that have been proposed to reduce the carbon emissions from the other end of the cow. Researchers are experimenting with “toilet-training” and “cow-fart-backpacks” to reduce the climate impact of waste and gas.

Importantly, all of these proposals for reducing methane fail to address any of the other negative impacts of animal agriculture: polluted water from farm runoff, the considerable water usage (about 1,800 gallons) required to produce even one pound of beef, the 80% of agricultural land used to produce a food that provides less than 20% of the world’s calories.

That doesn’t even begin to touch upon the animal cruelty inherent in the cattle industry. Even if you’re ethically unbothered by the idea of raising animals for slaughter, few would deny that the modern industrial animal agriculture system puts animals through grotesquely cruel experiences throughout their lives. The repeated, forced insemination of female cows who are soon separated from their calves (the males of which are then tightly confined to prevent the development of muscle and then slaughtered at 20 weeks old for veal), the dehorning by cauterization, the tail docking, the entire lives spent indoors on a concrete-floored enclosure.

Which brings me to one more absurd proposal from the cattle industry: virtual reality. Seriously. A Turkish farmer is reportedly experimenting with having cows wear virtual reality headsets to make them think they’re outside, on pasture. Besides the fact that scaling this strategy up would be incredibly expensive, if not impossible, the idea is ludicrous. If we care enough about cow welfare to offer them wearable technology that most humans don’t even have access to, why can’t we just stop confining, abusing, and killing them in the first place?

Occam’s razor says that the best solution is usually the simplest one. The obvious solution to all the environmental damage caused by industrial animal agriculture is to reduce the scale of animal agriculture. We have to feed the world less meat and more plants. I’m not saying that it’s easy or uncomplicated to get people accustomed to meat-heavy diets (especially Americans) to change the way they eat. But it is a manifest necessity, and it’s of dire importance.

Humankind, it seems, will go to great lengths to avoid sacrifice or even minor inconvenience. How are dietary supplements, masks, or backpacks more realistic, let alone more economical, than just cutting back on our consumption of animal protein? We already have animal-free proteins like lentils, beans, soy, and nuts; and cooks throughout history have found myriad ways to make them delicious. Instead of trying to convince cows to eat differently, let’s use our human powers of critical thinking and empathy to make better decisions where we can, and continue to invest in alternatives that actually cut demand. So to those who are financially and geographically able, it might be time to just order the veggie burger.

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