Published: 5 November 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
IF YOU TAKE ANY one-litre carton of milk off the shelf, you’ll be holding the equivalent of 900 litres of water – that’s the amount of water it takes to produce a litre of milk, in addition to the 1.25 kilograms of cattle fodder and seeds.
Milk cows don’t just consume a significant portion of planet earth’s dwindling resources but contribute significantly to global warming. Cow milk is responsible for 2.7 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, particularly methane, which has 84 times the impact on the greenhouse effect as does carbon dioxide.
Bio Milk is trying to change all this.
The company is planning to go public by merging with a publicly-trade shell company named Fantasy Network. Even the latter name seems apt for Bio Milk as it seeks to push an entire industry, one developed through thousands of years of genetic selection, into a new level of food-tech technology. Its goals seem like something out of agricultural fiction.
Bio Milk is trying to do for milk what companies like Beyond Meat are doing for meat: developing laboratory-cultured meat in order to persuade consumers to buy meat substitutes, thereby dramatically reducing the industry’s carbon footprint while also better enabling humanity to feed the planet’s population and its growing dairy consumption.
FULL STORY This Israeli firm intends to disrupt dairy industry by creating milk in labs (Haaretz)
Photo: Dr Nurit Argov-Argaman, one of Bio Milk’s founders and a lecturer in the Hebrew University’s faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment (Hen Raz)
