Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
Cell-cultivated meat is a new approach to producing meat products that involves growing animal tissue in bioreactors without slaughtering animals. It has attracted considerable investment and research interest for its potential to sustainably and ethically meet consumer demand for protein-rich foods. At scale, however, cell-cultivated meat represents an existential threat to livestock producers and their communities. The social implications of the growth of this technology for livestock supply chains remain a vastly understudied area, with no research to date on US farmers and ranchers, workers, or rural communities. Additionally, while methods exist to estimate the impacts of current food supply chains on different groups of stakeholders (e.g., workers, communities), there are no methods available to rigorously project how novel food technologies might affect these stakeholders in the near future. The goals of this project are to 1) investigate the social implications of the development of cell-cultivated meat technology on the livestock industry, with a particular focus on meatpacking workers and cow-calf producers, and 2) to develop a methodology that projects the potential social impacts of new food technologies along the supply chain (i.e., prospective social life cycle assessment or prospective S-LCA).Our team will use mixed methods - encompassing interviews, focus groups, surveys, and choice experiments - to understand meatpacking workers and beef producers' concerns and technological impacts on their livelihoods and communities, as well as to investigate how these concerns align with consumer priorities. Through prospective S-LCA, we will also model the impacts that cell-cultivated beef could have on beef supply chains nationwide under various scenarios. The results of our study will provide a greater understanding of 1) the concerns and preferences of cow-calf producers and other beef supply chain stakeholders in the context of cell-cultivated meat development; 2) the degree of alignment between producer concerns and consumer perceptions; and 3) the extent to which cell-cultivated beef may have detrimental, beneficial, or neutral social impacts relative to beef under a variety of future scenarios. We will also identify potential market-based opportunities to support beef producer adaptation to technological disruption from cell-cultivated meat. Finally, we will develop and disseminate a novel, widely applicable methodology to assess potential social impacts of new food technologies.
Animal Health Component
80%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
80%
Developmental
20%
Goals / Objectives
The goals of this project are to investigate the social implications of the development of cell-cultivated meat technology on the livestock industry, with a particular focus on meatpacking workers and cow-calf producers, as well as to develop a new prospective social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) methodology that can be broadly applied to new food and agricultural technologies.Objective 1: Assess meatpacking worker, beef producer, and consumer perceptions, attitudes, and concerns about cell-cultivated meat.Objective 1.1: Conduct interviews with beef meatpacking workers in Nebraska to begin understanding workers' and labor unions' perceptions of cell-cultivated meat, and to develop data for Obj. 2.Objective 1.2: Conduct interviews with cow-calf producers in Nebraska and Tennessee to gauge their perceptions of cell-cultivated meat. Elicited data from these interviews will inform questions and survey instrument design in Obj. 1.3 and 1.4.Objective 1.3: Conduct focus groups with small cow-calf producers to refine the survey instrument and develop a survey that includes a choice experiment and an attribute ranking exercise to gain insights into perceptions and attitudes about cell-cultivated meat.Objective 1.4: Conduct a survey with beef consumers that includes an attribute-ranking exercise to assess the concordance between consumers' preferences and producers' assessment of the new technology.Objective 2: Estimate the potential future social impacts of the development of cell-cultivated meat on beef producers and supply chains.Objective 2.1: Develop a prospective social life cycle assessment (prospective S-LCA) methodology for new food and agriculture technologies.Objective 2.2: Apply prospective S-LCA to the case example of cell-cultivated beef in the US.
Project Methods
Objective 1: Assess meatpacking workers, beef producers and consumer perceptions, attitudes, and concerns about cell-cultivated meat.Methods: We will conduct 20 semi-structured interviews with meatpacking workers employed in large beef plants in eastern Nebraska and 20 semi-structured interviews with small (under 100-head) cow-calf producers in Nebraska and Tennessee. Both sets of interviews are divided into two parts: current working conditions in the beef value chain, and exploratory conversations on workers' or farmers' perceptions of cell-cultivated meat's future. These exploratory interviews will allow us to refine questions for focus group testing and survey-instrument design. Each interview will be 60-90 minutes, conducted in English or Spanish, and in-person where possible. We will develop and administer an online survey with 100 beef producers in Nebraska and Tennessee to capture producers' attitudes, perceptions, and concerns regarding the potential impact of cultivated meat on their livelihoods. To develop this instrument, we will conduct For the instrument development focus groups, we will first conduct focus groups with 20 small cow-calf producers in Tennessee. To assess similarity between producers' responses and consumers' preferences, we will launch a survey that will include an attribute ranking exercise to capture the factors that meat consumers perceive to have potential impacts on beef producers' livelihoods when facing new technologies. This will allow direct comparison of results ("convergence analysis") to assess the alignment between consumers' perceptions and interests and producers' assessment of the impact of cell-cultivated meat on their livelihoods. We will recruit a nationally representative survey of 500 participants using the Qualtrics platform.Data Analysis and Interpretation: For the choice experiment, quantitative analysis will involve assessing preferences for and trade-offs among the attributes under the different scenarios. Choice modeling methods, using mixed logit and other models, will be used to quantify and compare responses. Choice modeling methods, using mixed logit and other models, will be used to quantify and compare responses. In the case of focus groups, qualitative content analysis will be applied to transcribed discussions to identify themes, concerns, and attitudes shared by participants. The survey data will undergo both quantitative analyses, using statistical techniques for attribute ranking and preference assessment, and qualitative analysis to interpret open-ended responses.Expected Results: Overall, we aim to understand the potential consequences that cell-cultivated meat may have on beef producers and workers. Through in-depth discussions in the semi-structured interviews, we will also generate data that allow us to begin gauging producers' familiarity with cell-cultivated meat, the idioms that they use to understand this technology, and their sense of its socio-cultural implications. We seek to uncover the effects that trust and risk have on the perceived impact of this new technology. Given the mixed-methods approach, we will develop and learn from the lived experiences of beef producers. Further, we will be able to identify potential market alignments to the most pressing social challenges to beef producers' livelihoods arising from new technologies.Objective 2: Estimate the potential future social impacts of the development of cell-cultivated meat on beef producers and supply chainsMethods: We will develop a new prospective social life cycle assessment (prospective S-LCA) methodology that will combine data from current supply chains with future scenarios to identify potential social impacts of new food technology development. Conducting an LCA according to international standards (ISO 14040 and 14044) has four phases: 1) goal and scope (research design), 2) inventory development, 3) impact assessment (data analysis) and 4) interpretation. We will develop our prospective S-LCA methodology to align with this approach.We will apply our new prospective S-LCA method to the case example of cell-cultivated beef technology development in the US. For the goal and scope phase, we will use literature and secondary data to define a preliminary slate of stakeholder groups, social impact categories, indicators, scenarios, and data collection approach. Initial scenarios will be developed based on literature on trajectories of cultivated meat development (e.g., high displacement, low displacement), and then refined with Research Advisory Board feedback.Primary and secondary data collection will be necessary to parameterize our S-LCA models. For the cell-cultivated beef value chain, there are no reliable, publicly available datasets on current and future organizational characteristics, to our knowledge. Rather than relying on expert opinion, we will conduct structured interviews within cell-cultivated meat companies (n=4-6) to parameterize our model. We will also use indicator data from the Social Hotspots Database (SHDB), the leading S-LCA database, to fill data gaps when needed.For beef value chains, the foundation of our data collection approach will be leveraging nationally representative secondary datasets. Where nationally-representative data are not available, our geographic scope will narrow to states targeted in Objective 1. Indicator data for social impact categories that cannot be measured through USDA ERS' Agricultural and Resource Management Survey or other secondary datasets will be assessed through producer interviews and surveys in Objective 1.Data Analysis and Interpretation: Potential impacts will be analyzed using a Reference Scale Social Life Cycle Impact Assessment approach, where performance on each social indicator is assessed relative to a standard.Expected Results: Our prospective S-LCA method will include two distinct aspects: 1) side-by-side descriptive analysis of the new technology's supply chain and the primary affected supply chain to illuminate current social impacts and vulnerabilities and 2) a change-oriented scenario analysis to identify potential impacts (positive, negative, neutral) by stakeholder group along the value chain. A key output from this work will be a seminal article on the methodology for prospective S-LCA in food and agriculture. The results of our prospective S-LCA case study will illustrate 1) current social impacts (detrimental, beneficial, neutral/acceptable) in both value chains, 2) vulnerabilities in the current beef value chain, and 3) the extent to which development of cell-cultivated beef may have detrimental, beneficial, or neutral impacts relative to beef under a variety of market scenarios.