Disruptive dietary shift to plant-based proteins and alternative meats.
Authors: Lisa Wainger
Other contributors: Dave Abler
A dramatic change in agricultural production that looks past current trends to explore low-probability, high-impact shifts that could redefine the region's future.
The plant-based meat scenario, Scenario 5, was proposed by the research team to explore the effects of major disruptions to the agricultural system due to reduced demand for meat products. The growth of plant-based milks has already contributed to declining consumption and reduced demand for cow’s milk. This scenario captures the potential for new plant-based products in the meat sector to generate a similar outcome.
Scenarios 1-4 largely envision moderate, albeit highly meaningful, changes in farming in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Scenario 5 complements those stakeholder-envisioned scenarios by expanding the range of future uncertainty that is captured. While the future range of outcomes may be most likely to include incremental change, history is also marked by events that led to major changes in short periods of time, such as the adoption of smartphones. Therefore, futurists and decision scientists often recommend that sets of scenarios used to explore uncertainty include less probable, but still plausible, scenarios. Even if these wildcard scenarios do not come to pass, they can help anticipate risks and prepare for opportunities of many types of system change.
These wildcard scenarios are often built by conducting horizon scanning that looks to news and other sources for evidence of emerging trends. In 2019, when the Thriving Ag project began, investment banks projected that the plant-based protein and alternative meat sector would grow by 20-fold over the next decade. Reasons for such growth included product innovations focused on taste (such as Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat) and an environmental rationale. To reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Bill Gates, among others, suggested that wealthy countries shift to plant-based synthetic beef.
In this scenario, the current market growth for meat alternatives was envisioned to move from "high growth" to a full-fledged disruption of traditional beef, poultry, and swine producers. Conceivably, this market growth could be propelled by future policies penalizing animal operations for environmental impacts or greenhouse gas emissions. Or, reduced meat consumption could be a side effect of the spread of alpha-gal syndrome, a meat allergy induced by tick bites.
In the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, a major disruption could prompt most poultry, swine, and beef operations to either exit farming completely or transition to the alternative protein market by supplying inputs for plant-based products. Some of the main ingredients for new and future plant-based protein products include soy, wheat, peas, oats, and mushrooms, all of which are feasible in this region. Some market analysts were also predicting a shortage of (yellow) peas at the time, making them an attractive transition crop. Given that the U.S. has historically exported meat to other countries, and that global demand for meat is growing, plant-based diet changes would need to occur in countries beyond the U.S. to cause major land transitions out of livestock and feed crop production in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, or farms could convert to raising meat for export. Still, the bottom line is that – should it come to pass – this scenario could lead to major farm-level and land-use changes in the watershed.
Most stakeholders found it difficult to engage in this scenario due to its undesirability from their perspectives. Nonetheless, the potential for dramatic changes in land use was a useful thought experiment for some researchers. This scenario also served as an extreme endmember of the ecosystem services scenario (Scenario 2) as newly fallowed cropland and pasture would create opportunities for major reforestation, habitat creation, and water quality improvements.
References
Peters, C.J., Picardy, J., Darrouzet-Nardi, A.F., Wilkins, J.L., Griffin, T.S., Fick, G.W., 2016. Carrying capacity of U.S. agricultural land: Ten diet scenarios. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 4, 000116. doi.org/10.12952/journal.elementa.000116
