Precision fermentation companies are producing milk proteins without cows at commercial scale. Understanding the current state of lab-grown dairy helps advocates support a technology with major welfare implications for dairy cows globally.
Dairy cow welfare involves significant and well-documented harms: continuous pregnancy cycles to maintain milk production, calf separation within days of birth, high culling rates for reduced productivity, and lameness and mastitis as common diseases. Lab-grown dairy proteins offer a pathway to delivering nutritionally identical dairy ingredients without any of these welfare costs. The welfare impact of widespread adoption would be enormous -- the global dairy industry involves hundreds of millions of cows. Supporting precision fermentation dairy is therefore supporting a technology with potentially massive welfare impact at scale.