The end of farming: factories with lab-grown miik and cultured meat will replace industrial farms.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Column

Modern biotechnology could put dairy farms out of business. And not just dairy, but lots of other farms as well, including those that produce meat, leather, and even staple starches. In fact, the amount of land devoted to agriculture could shrink by 80 percent in the next few decades.

In the mid-1960s, when I was growing up on a dairy farm in the Virginia Appalachians, there were 3.2 million farms in the United States. About 600,000 of them produced some milk for sale. Nationally, there were just under 15 million milk cows, and dairy-producing farms averaged about 20 per operation. (My family ran about 40 head of cows.) Fewer than 2 percent of dairy farms operated with more than 100 cows. Each cow produced a bit more than 8,000 pounds of milk per year, and the country consumed about 124 billion pounds of milk annually.

By 2012, the number of farms with dairy cows had dropped to just over 50,000, and nearly 50 percent of cows lived on farms with more than 1,000 animals.The total number of milk cows dropped to 9.2 million, each producing about 22,000 pounds of milk per year. American consumption of milk had risen to about 200 billion pounds annually. Dairy today accounts for about 12 percent of all calories consumed by Americans every year.

Now the startup Muufri (pronounced moo-free) aims to use biotech to make perfect cow's milk. The lab-grown milk is a compound of six proteins and eight fatty acids. Cow genes are added to yeast grown in vats, from which those compounds are harvested. Muufri will add the proper proportions of minerals like calcium and potassium to the mixture, though it can leave out lactose, which 75 percent of the world's adults have trouble digesting.

The company's founders claim their milk won't need pasteurization, since it is produced in super-clean lab conditions. By varying the ratios of the compounds, they can recreate goat's milk, sheep's milk, or even buffalo milk. And just like regular milk, Muufri can be turned into any other dairy product, including cheeses and ice cream.

Let's make the heroic assumption that Muufri or its competitors will completely replace the current dairy industry. That would put 50,000 dairy farmers out of business and significantly reduce the amount of agricultural land devoted to that industry.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), there are nearly 2.3 billion acres of land in the United States. Four hundred and eight million acres of that is cropland, while pasture...