To make the Galy cotton, a team collects samples from a plant and harvests its cells. The cells are grown in bioreactor or fermentation vessels in a cell culture process similar to beer brewing. The final product is dried and harvested, with minimized water, land and energy use, Galy says.

Maybe I just misread the sentence. But the full quote seems deliberately obtuse to me. They don’t explicitly say that they need less water than traditional farming.

This article is very thin on the details. Why would anyone want to cultivate a plant in the lab that grows perfectly well in fields across multiple climate zones?