[THE ORIGINAL POST WAS WRITTEN IN FRENCH]
While cows are ruminating, biotechnology is producing milk proteins that are molecularly identical to those found in cow’s milk. Although these proteins are increasingly present in the food market, they still struggle to move beyond the laboratory scale. This blog offers a discussion on this type of innovation and on the relationship to food and living beings that it creates.
During the fourth professional forum on forage autonomy organized by Fugea in Ath, I was talking with a local breeder who was worried about the rapid deployment of milking robots on farms. With obvious sarcasm, he said: “As if they didn’t already no longer need us… what’s next? Soon we won’t even need cows to make milk!” At the time, I thought his remarks were exaggerated and that we weren’t there yet. Yet he was concerned about a reality already well established in certain countries, such as the United States, where the FDA—the American agency responsible for the control of food and drugs—has already approved several precision-fermented dairy proteins.
It was through one of the many newsletters I subscribe to in order to follow the latest news in the agricultural and agri-food sectors that I learned about the existence of lab-grown dairy proteins.
If I don’t take an interest in every new oddity of the agro-industry, this one caught my attention because it resonates with the breeder’s words and with my own research interests. Through my PhD, I follow the various controversies surrounding livestock farming, and more specifically dairy farming. Precision fermentation is promoted (by research and food-industry entrepreneurship) as a sustainable alternative to dairy production as we know it—that is, “traditional” milk[1]
A second oddity: one of the companies I am interested in because of its significant role in the dairy-equipment market is also promoting this solution. GEA (Global Engineering Alliance), one of the four largest milking-system suppliers in Belgium, is actively involved in the promotion and development of protein production through precision fermentation. The group has been active in the dairy sector since the 1990s and is now contributing to the “[still] silent revolution” of milk proteins (beta-casein, alpha-lactalbumin, beta-lactoglobulin, lactotransferrin, etc.) derived from precision fermentation by helping startups scale up rapidly from the laboratory to industrial production. GEA is therefore both on the farmers’ side and simultaneously helping to develop what could bring about their downfall.
As with cultured meat, for which research accelerated at the end of the 1990s and whose products are now beginning (with difficulty) to reach the market, biotechnological alternatives to animal milk are beginning to emerge—at least in research laboratories. Precision fermentation promises a milk that tastes just like the real thing while being more sustainable and more ethical, terms used here in their historically and geographically situated sense to designate lab-grown milk. Globally, livestock farming is said to be responsible for 14.5% of greenhouse-gas emissions (notably methane and nitrous oxide). While the question of “sustainable” livestock farming is a subject of controversy that will certainly be explored in a future blog, precision fermentation as a means of obtaining milk proteins seems to offer a proposal far removed from the complexity of agricultural, social, and environmental issues.
Precision fermentation requires a massive input of sugar. While it does not directly threaten dairy farming, it can weaken its economy because it diverts forage production away from animal feed—a trend that can already be observed in Europe with the expansion of biomethanization. In the United States, corn and soybean producers can earn better prices when their crops are destined for the precision-fermentation industry rather than the animal-feed market. Moreover, integrating lab-grown proteins into hyper-concentrated value chains is one of the sine qua non conditions for their production, offering agri-food giants a “sustainable” and “low-carbon” alternative to their product portfolios. In 2023, Danone bought shares in the Israeli start-up ImaginDairy, thereby incorporating the proteins produced by the start-up into its dairy products.
Among the foodtech[2] companies leading the precision-fermentation movement, Solar Foods—commercializing its Solein® protein on a large scale since 2024 in the United States—markets its protein as “independent of weather and climate conditions, land use, and large-scale water consumption, making it one of the most sustainable proteins in the world.”
With this claim, Solar Foods nurtures the imaginary of a future diet disconnected from living beings, soil, and seasons, and simultaneously continues the industrialization of our food system. In 2018, the French Ministry of Agriculture, Agri-food, and Food Sovereignty published a blog on the subject. Precision biology would steer food toward a food-as-software model, in which our energy and protein intake is “programmed” by agri-industrial engineers.
Source: https://www.thebullvine.com/fr/tag/precision-fermentation-dairy/
Because that is precisely what is at stake. Precision fermentation is an industrial process in which modified micro-organisms are programmed using the genetic code of cows’ whey proteins. These micro-organisms ferment sugars in tanks of nearly 200,000 liters, producing proteins that are molecularly identical to those made by cows. While this technology has long been used to produce insulin or rennet, milk proteins represent a new step in this area of biotechnology.
The success of the process requires controlled conditions: temperature, pH, and oxygen are continuously monitored thanks to digital twins that simulate the chemical reactions taking place inside the bioreactor. Digital twins are the complete dataset of a model associated with an object (or subject) throughout its lifetime—that is, a virtual version of that object. We will have the opportunity to explore them in more detail in future blog posts.
Behind a small window, the technician monitors the operation. They ensure the biological needs of the micro-organisms by adjusting parameters, rates, and percentages that will guarantee the dissipation of heat—released by the cells during metabolism—and the continuous mixing of the solution. It is through this industrial process that milk proteins are produced.
What takes place in these laboratories is presented as a natural process: the production of “real” milk that will nevertheless never have seen a cow’s udder. It is no longer the hands of the farmer nor the milking cups that draw milk from cows, but a technician who cultivates it thanks to advances in molecular and computational biology, using a battery of sensors, software, and automated tools that make it possible to control every step of the process[3].
Seeing the criticisms coming — “this is not real milk,” “this is not natural” — GEA reminds us that humans have always fermented their foods to preserve them or improve their taste or texture. We have co-evolved with fermentation. This argument echoes the rhetoric used by defenders of new genomic techniques (the new GMOs): humans have always selected their seeds; only the technique has changed[4].
Yet technique is not just a method. It involves material and economic resources, socio-professional groups, and specific environments in order to exist. A technology creates the conditions of existence for certain professions and practices while erasing others.
Moreover, have we not also co-evolved with the other animal species around us? What would milk without cows mean for our health? For farmers? For our landscapes? Just as cultivated meat will never reproduce the diversity of meat from different species, breeds, and cuts, it is difficult to imagine that cultivated milk could be as rich as “traditional” milk. ImaginDairy’s cheeses, designed in the Startup Village of Yokneam, the “cradle of Israeli agrifoodtech,” are, for example, made from only seven ingredients (including flavorings and stabilizers).
Source: Le Guern, Philippe. (2020). Robots, élevage et techno-capitalisme : Une ethnographie du robot de traite. Réseaux, N° 220-221(2), 253‑291. https://doi.org/10.3917/res.220.0253
Although milk proteins produced through precision fermentation have so far remained at the prospecting stage, the enormous fundraising efforts aimed at accelerating their industrial scaling, as well as their authorization in other “pioneer” countries (the United States, Israel), may lead us to anticipate future deregulations in Europe [5].
What will the social acceptance of this type of food be? If the debate takes hold here, will we see mobilizations similar to those against GMOs? Who will position themselves for or against these programmed proteins? What would a cheese made with lab-grown proteins taste like? What is the energy cost of this milk? What would the consequences be for farmers, cows, cheesemakers?
Beyond food, energy, or nutritional questions, it is essential in this controversy to view dairy farming not only as a material form of production (milk, but also organic matter such as manure) but also as an important social practice and intangible asset. Through the way it shapes landscapes, the social ties it generates, and the diversity of ways it fosters relationships with living beings, dairy farming must be examined and considered in all its complexity by society as a whole; otherwise, we risk seeing this “unconsidered space” filled by the barons of deep tech, who will program tomorrow’s food for us.
The farmer I met in Ath last February does not have milking robots, and the second-hand milking parlor he purchased does not match the high-tech solutions offered by the company GEA. Beyond the promises and performance of the latest agricultural technologies, on-the-ground situations in agriculture remain highly diverse. As long as this diversity persists—and as long as the gestures of milking, processing, and the use of imperfect tools endure—livestock farming will remain, still, a human story.
[1] The term traditional is somewhat vague, as it covers a wide variety of production systems (grass-based, conventional corn–soy, robotic milking or milking parlors, etc.), but it is used here to contrast farm-produced milk with lab-produced milk. Indeed, precision fermentation is described as “natural” since it involves reproducing biological processes… in a laboratory.
[2] La foodtech est un anglicisme construit à partir des mots food et technology. Ce terme met en avant un écosystème de jeunes entreprises innovantes qui emploient les nouvelles technologies dans le secteur de l’alimentation. (source: wikipedia.org)
[3] It is worth noting that these kinds of tools are also found—and increasingly so—on farms, as dairy farming follows a broader trend toward industrialization.
[4] To know more about NGT : https://www.natpro.be/actus/dereglementation-des-nouveaux-ogm-pas-question/
[5] All the more so as French foodtech start-ups are already getting involved, and some of them will sell their proteins on the U.S. market as early as 2026.