DEAR EDITOR I read an article recently around the whole area of ‘precision fermentation’ – essentially what I took from article is that if you put the right microbe in a bioreactor, give it water, carbon dioxide, hydrogen and sunlight and it doubles its mass every three hours.

Drain the resultant soup off, dry it and you have 65% edible protein, fats or carbohydrates.

You can also turn it into appetising food for people, but the big prize is animal feed.

The article suggested half the world’s farmland is used to feed domestic animals. Anyway, seemingly the first factory opens near Helsinki this year.

If precision fermentation lives up to its expectations, it will present great opportunities and challenges for farmers.

The UN could build a bioreactor in every food deprived country. For our own farmers, the challenge will be will they have ownership of precision fermentation or will they be customers of some private precision fermentation company?

Individual farmers will not be in a position to set up a precision fermentation bioreactor. If they want to have ownership, farmers will have to form co-operatives.