Bill Gates and CowTech: Fix or replace our friends in the pasture?

Cow-lovers can take heart in this report from TheWeek.com about the Bill Gates Super Cow, which begins:BBC reported Friday that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will invest millions of dollars to promote “the health and productivity of livestock” through research by Global Alliance for Livestock Veterinary Medicines. “For over a billion people living in the world’s poorest countries, agriculture and livestock are a lifeline out of poverty,” Gates said Friday. “You can sell the output, and that’s money for school fees. You can keep the output, and that’s diet diversification.” But here’s the flip side: a whole bunch of investments in cow replacement. Earlier this year Memphis Meats announced an investment from the venture capital arm of food industry leader Tyson Foods. Memphis Meats is a leader in the growing ‘clean meat’ or ‘cultured meat’ field, which focuses on producing real meat directly from animal cells, without the need to raise or process animals. The terms of the investment were not disclosed. Tyson Foods joins a diverse group of investors in Memphis Meats, which includes Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Cargill to continue developing delicious products, to accelerate its work in scaling up clean meat production, and to reduce production costs to levels comparable to – and ultimately below – conventional meat costs.The point of Memphis Meats is to, uh, replace the cow.