I have a bit of a mixed view on this overall. The growth of meat may be beneficial in someways. It could be cheaper to make. It may be healthier since it may not be succumbed to disease as easily. It may make a lot of animal rights' activists happy since animals aren't being slaughtered.
And yet there's still a downside to this: what happens to the excess animals? A point of growing meat seems to be to keep the animals farmers raise from being killed. But it may actually make things worse for them.
To date, from my understanding, there's a lot more of these animals (chickens, pigs, cows, etc) than there are people. Even though they are being slaughtered every day to make meat for us, why are there so many more than us? That's easy. That's because we eat them, and the government needs to keep up with supply and demand. If meat demand increases, the number of animals increase to keep up. If we, oh say, decided that bears were a good profit, we could start raising bears and increase their numbers dramatically just so that the supply and demand could be met.
Farms today are a business and the profit farmers typically make comes from the food they have, both grown from the ground and raised in the barn or pasture. Farmers that have a lot of animals may get some profit from selling meat, which sells better than milk and eggs I think.
Now you could say that they'd still make a profit without meat. Well that is true, but they wouldn't get as much meat. While some farms may not be as well effected since they may not sell meat, but what about those that do? There are farms with a ton of animals that the farmers need to pay food and shelter for all the time. Without the selling of meat, they lose a large chunk of this profit. Suddenly they are stuck with a ton of animals they have no other use for, sucking up their income and space just so that they can be kept alive.
The farmers can just switch over to milk and eggs (wool if they have sheep), at least for cows and hens. They could keep a few males around to make sure they breed. But they wouldn't need as large of numbers since they wouldn't be selling meat anymore. One option to get more money is to increase the price on eggs, milk, wool, whatever crop the farmer is selling, but that may not go over too well. To compensate for the profit lost, there'd have to be an increase in either price or the amount of milk, eggs, and wool that would need to be produced, and even that may not help.
So what happens to the extras? On top of that, what happens to the pigs? Their main cultivation is meat. I don't know of anything else pigs would be good for on a farm. What happens to all these animals that farmers would have no need for if their meat was no longer in demand?
Well there's a couple options. There's finding a home for all of them, which would not be that easy considering the sheer volume of all these animals. They could try to keep them and make the best of it. But without that extra money coming in so they could actually feed all these animals, the farmers would have a tougher time keeping everyone properly fed and some animals may end up starving to death. They could grab a gun and shoot all the excess animals, pretty much slaughtering them, which is what growing meat is supposed to prevent from happening.
The final option I can see is that they just release these animals in the wild, but that would not play out well. We are talking a ton of animals here, from many different parts of the country, being released into the wild. First off, because they've been in the care of humans, not only would their stomachs likely not be able to handle the stuff not grown by the humans for them, but they may not be fully prepared to fight against predators who'd want to kill them for food. On top of that, there's environmental damage from these animals eating. Herbivores cause more damage, typically, than carnivores, and with an increase of them in a very short amount of them, we're talking not only damage to forests, woods, etc, but also decreased numbers of native species such as deer, which will have less food if cattle were released.
I'm not saying growing meat is a bad idea. I'm just saying that it may bring about consequences that people may not see coming. I may try growing meat, but personally I hope that meat from real animals will continue to be profitable.
I hope I didn't offend anyone. That wasn't my intention.
