In this instalment of The Cell Base's ‘Start-up spotlight,' we speak to Sebastian Lowe, co-founder of Red Tail, a British initiative that aims to help farmers produce cultivated meat and change conventional agriculture.
How did Red Tail’s vision of helping farmers transition to cultivated meat technologies come about?
Farmers have produced our food for thousands of years, adapting production methods to integrate the latest technology, and we believe they should continue to do so!
The development of cultivated meat technology over the past decade has been incredible. However, academics and NGOs are warning of the danger that cultivated meat could pose to the livelihoods of traditional livestock farmers if the industry becomes too centralised. Consequently, we saw a need to build a framework to mitigate against the negative social impacts and help small and medium sized producers enter the industry. Our framework helps farmers to enter the cultivated meat market with very low risk.
Farmers who do diversify into cultivated meat could significantly increase their profits in comparison to traditional livestock rearing, whilst simultaneously minimising their environmental impact. What’s more, if meat production can be decoupled from land-use, our framework has the potential to increase biodiversity and improve natural ecosystems on swathes of farmland.
What key challenges could farmers face when integrating cultivated meat production into their existing operations?
Lack of familiarity with the production process of cultivated meat is likely to be an obstacle for farmers. Resultantly, they may be unwilling to take a financial risk on a technology they are not familiar with.
To overcome these challenges, we will take care of the meat production by sourcing and installing the required hardware, and then overseeing the meat production through remote monitoring and regular site visits from Red Tail biotechnicians. We also provide a financial framework that de-risks the operation for our partner farms.
How will Red Tail's support enable farmers to balance profitability with sustainable practices?
The average margin for traditional beef farmers today is £0.21 per kilogram. By producing cultivated meat on farms, we shorten value chains which removes many associated costs of traditional meat production (vet bills, livestock transport, abattoir costs, etc). We will therefore ensure farmers keep a higher portion of the profit from the meat produced on their farms, whilst simultaneously producing fewer greenhouse gas emissions and restoring ecosystems on areas of land no longer required for meat production. This will improve both profitability and sustainability for our partner farms.
What role does cultivated meat play in your rewilding initiatives?
By decoupling on-farm meat production from land use, farmers are able to maintain the same level of meat production, but repurpose land previously required for livestock rearing.
This will allow farmers to profit from natural capital markets whilst maintaining their crucial role as food producers and improve biodiversity across the country. Red Tail’s expanding network of partner farms will aggregate these rewilding efforts, creating a larger initiative capable of attracting substantial investment and going some way towards restoring the severely depleted biodiversity in the country.
How do you help farmers utilise existing equipment for cultivated meat production?
Many farmers we have spoken to have farm buildings currently sitting empty as dead assets. Our facility will be housed in a repurposed farm building, turning these dead assets into revenue-generating buildings. As we will utilise modular hardware, we can construct a facility that is suitable for the building size, and no major infrastructure changes of the building will be required. If the partner farm is producing renewable energy, this can be utilised to further reduce the emissions and production costs of the operation.
As well as utilising existing equipment, we can utilise the existing expertise of farmers in complying with health and safety regulations and maintaining a sterile environment in the facility.
What opportunities do you see for cultivated meat to diversify farmers' income streams?
We recently visited a farm in Shropshire that has built a gin distillery in a repurposed farm building, and offers distillery tours and tasting sessions on site. Doing something similar with cultivated meat and hosting tasting evenings would be a great opportunity to engage and educate the local community on the benefits of cultivated meat, whilst generating additional income for our partner farmers.
Long-term, our model will open up a range of exciting opportunities for farmers to diversify beyond cultivated meat and natural capital markets. If thriving ecosystems can be restored on farmland, increasing biodiversity and attracting rare breeds, farmers could explore ecotourism opportunities on their land. Similarly, due to the lack of large predators in the UK, if farmers incorporated free-roaming herbivores such as wild boar or long-horn cattle into their rewilding projects, sporadic culls to manage numbers would produce high-quality, high-welfare rare breed meat, which farmers could sell.
How has Red Tail’s model been received within the farming community, and what successes have you seen so far/when do you expect to see them?
So far, farmers have been receptive to our model. We recognise that farming today is not a profitable endeavour for many, but where farms have produced food for generations, many feel a duty to continue that tradition. With weather patterns becoming more unpredictable due to climate change, producing cultivated meat indoors is a sensible diversification, particularly as it offers more regular cash flow with harvest cycles every 6-10 weeks.
Our model helps farmers become more profitable and more sustainable, but also continue their way of life as food producers. By producing cultivated meat and repurposing land previously used for livestock grazing, ecosystem restoration can coexist sustainably alongside both conventional and innovative food production.
We will open our first on-farm facility in 2026. Our key objective is to demonstrate that on-farm cultivated meat production is both viable and profitable. Once we have shown this, we hope to scale up rapidly and spread the benefits of this technology to as many farmers as possible.
Will you employ strategies to scale your model and support more farmers globally?
For now, our focus is on proving our concept in the UK with our pilot in 2026. As founders, we all grew up in the British countryside and we understand the cultural importance of farming in the UK. With the removal of farming subsidies and changes to inheritance tax laws for farmers, we believe that our model can provide some much-needed financial support to farms.
Additionally, the UK is ranked 29th lowest out of 218 countries in the world for biodiversity. We are one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. We therefore hope that our model, if scaled out rapidly in the UK, can go some way towards correcting this.
Consequently, our initial focus is on the UK because we believe that this will maximise our impact. However, in the long-term there definitely is scope to scale-out globally. We would look to areas where our model could have the biggest impact, such as in parts of the developing world where population growth and increased meat demand is most acutely damaging biodiverse natural ecosystems.
How do you ensure that farmers are equipped with the knowledge and resources to succeed in this new era of cellular agriculture?
To ensure the process is hassle-free for our partner farmers, we will take care of the on-farm production, marketing and selling of the meat.
By building a network of farmers producing cultivated meat, we are able to provide resources, best practice guides and a support network to help farmers entering into a new space. As always, there will be people opposed to this change in our food system. Building a community of like-minded farmers who can support one-another will be important to maximising the uptake and the success of on-farm cultivated meat.
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