Youre throwin out a lotta tangents there. Farming practices could be improved but this is strictly comparing between farmed cotton and lab grown. How good farmed soil is at sequestering carbon is being compared to no soil at all. Its commercial flooring over a concrete foundation. And theres not really any building required for growing cotton.

Vehicle emissions would be something to consider. Again, we dont have any metrics here, farm equipment is big because it is harvesting a lot of cotton. That brings down the emissions to cotton volume ratio, but i dont know what kind of numbers its going up against.

The rural thing sounds wrong, but its not specifically relevant anyway, a cotton farmer can live in a city, and cotton farms, for how much cotton they produce, might not be sprawling land use. Without knowing how much cotton per acreage lab grown cotton can produce, the farm might be the denser production use of land. We just use a lot of cotton. This may very well be wrong, we're just missing anything to compare. I am a big fan of nature, but for all the problems of modern farming practices, they are still planting plants, and im gonna need a lot of convincing that a lab can produce more efficiently than a plant.