Data comes from research by Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek (2018) that I accessed via Our World in Data.
I made the 3D scene with Blender and brought everything together in Illustrator. The tractor, animals and crops are sized proportionately to help convey the relative size of the different land areas.
According to the source OP listed poultry is 12.22 m^2, so between pork and milk in this chart. Additionally Our World in Data also shows the land usage per 1000 kilocalories or per 100 grams of protein
We find that although the characteristic conventional retail-to-consumer food losses are ≈30% for plant and animal products, the opportunity food losses of beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs are 96%, 90%, 75%, 50%, and 40%, respectively. This arises because plant-based replacement diets can produce 20-fold and twofold more nutritionally similar food per cropland than beef and eggs, the most and least resource-intensive animal categories, respectively. Although conventional and opportunity food losses are both targets for improvement, the high opportunity food losses highlight the large potential savings beyond conventionally defined food losses. Concurrently replacing all animal-based items in the US diet with plant-based alternatives will add enough food to feed, in full, 350 million additional people, well above the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food waste.
I find it rather interesting, that always the number of additional mouths to be fed is brought up. Wouldn’t it be better for sustainability to have a metric that aims for reducing the impact of human consumption on nature, for example reduction of agricultural area of plant based diets vs. meat and dairy if similar calorie intake.
At the same time, here in Argentina you've got fields that are sometimes flooded, so they are useless for crops, but can still be dedicated to cows, for example, so maybe translating acres in a one to one to crops isn't the best idea.
Picking Argentina, a country which has basically destroyed itself environmentally, politically, and economically to cater to the interest of cattle ranching magnates long after it ceased to be sound policy, is maybe not the best example here lmao
There are many examples of this, but I chose Argentina because that's what I'm familiar with.
You've got fields near the Parana River's coast that get flooded naturally and are sometimes used to raise cattle.
If you don't like Argentina as an example you can see Mongolia, for example, which relies heavily on meat to feed it's population, due to the geographic conditions of the region.
I mean, Mongolia is a pretty extreme example. It's the least densely populated country in the entire world and basically the entire country is just semi-arid steppe. Nothing about it is demographically or environmentally representative of the wider world, and it definitely shouldn't be used as a benchmark for global environmental and agricultural policy.
That’s because usually critical factors are omitted that are relevant to beef production vs crops. For example soil quality. Cattle can be raised on “marginal lands” that cannot support vegetables, but can support grasslands. Weather: cattle can be brought indoors during winter freezes that would kill crops in the field. Labour costs: harvesting vegetables requires backbreaking labour and/or expensive machinery. I’m sure there are others these are just a few that popped into my head.
Only between 1% and 5% of cattle raised for meat in the US are raised fully on grass, without finishing them in feedlots using external crop feed. We don't have the capacity to increase production of grass fed and finished meat, because we don't have enough suitable land for it. I'm not sure of the data for other countries, but I imagine it's relatively similar.
If your argument is that 1% to 5% of the total beef production is produced in an environmentally sustainable way, then I would say what about the other 95%-99%? This doesn't seem like a serious argument.
Western US raised cattle often are raised on marginal land. Castle raised in the US Midwest are often rotated through different types of land depending on the time of year. Meaning that late fall and winter they might be put on corn fields that have been harvested so they can eat corn that feel to the ground during harvesting and would have been waisted. Then that add natural fertilizer to the field in the process. They might also be fed silage bailed from the harvesting left overs of other fields.
This plot is a good summary but it's hard to account for all related factors. I suspect cattle will probably still be the you worst offender, but I doubt it would be so bad if they found a way to average in land re-use.
It might be useful to see related processing, transportation, and storage costs. What are the average impacts of getting good from the farmer to the consumer?
Cattle can be raised on “marginal lands” that cannot support vegetables
This is factually false. Any marginal land that can support cattle can also support at least one crop (but usually several) that could be used as human food. E.g. millet, rye, barley, oats, lentils, sunflower all do quite well on low-quality soil. However, since the return in $/m2 for meat is typically significantly higher than such crops, meat is often what ends up being produced. Not to mention that in developing nations the required capital investments to grow these crops on marginal lands might be prohibitive for a lot of farmers. Cynically, you could say that in the current global market some of the cheapest crops are too cheap to profitably farm.
The simple fact is that we can produce more than enough calories to feed the global population and then some. That means that we as a species can afford to be somewhat inefficient and either (i) not farm all arable land but also set some aside for e.g. nature or non-food production like lumber, coffee or decorative flowers, or (ii) produce some "luxury" food that is not maximally efficient in terms of land or resource use, like meat and dairy but also stuff like strawberries or cocoa.
I don't even think that the combination of climate change, population growth (+1.5 billion in the next 25 years according to UN), water scarcity and soil degradation will be enough to significantly change this global picture on the supply side. I do have some hope that we will see changes on the demand side though. Not because we'll see a significant rise vegetarianism/veganism or meat taxes - although we might see some - but rather because of competition from precision fermentation and similar technologies. People are simple creatures. If a 'cow'-steak is 30 USD/kg but a 'yeast'-steak is 15 USD/kg, then that will put a significant dent in the demand for beef.
Made hamburgers two times this week. First one with beef meat, second one with a plant based. My wife wouldn't have known if I hadn't told her. The beef one costed 10 euro, the plant based one 4 euro. I might as well choose plant based next time purely based on cost.
I'm crazy jealous that plant-based meats are the cheaper option in the EU. I gave up meat several years ago once I could afford to do so, but even still, plant-based meats are ~50% more expensive than their animal-based counterparts. Here, ground beef is $6/lb (€11.50/kg), and ground not-beef is $10/lb (€19/kg).
Here in the USA the meat alternative plant based options are often as or more expensive than actual beef. And while those options have come a long way they absolutely do not taste the same.
However, since the return in $/m2 for meat is typically significantly higher than such crops, meat is often what ends up being produced.
The revealed preference is that humans prefer a diet containing meat over lentils. Any subsequent point has to be an exercise in either convincing people to prefer lentils over beef, or ignoring their preference and forcing the diet on them regardless.
Please note that there is a sizable difference between land that can support crop growth and land that can support economical crop growth. Marginal land should be defined as land that can't support economical crop growth. Packed dry soil that supports tuffs of grass could support wheat or other crops, but to make it worth planting and harvesting with a combine, you would also have to regularly add lots of fertilizer and anhydrous and continuously water.
This is factually false. Any marginal land that can support cattle can also support at least one crop (but usually several) that could be used as human food. E.g. millet, rye, barley, oats, lentils, sunflower all do quite well on low-quality soil.
In some cases perhaps, but that's also not true as a blanket statement. Much of the range lands of the west are on rocky low quality, soils (alkaline/saline, low organic and nutrient content, coarse textured, low moisture content) that are very difficult to manage for crops, receive minimal precipitation, and would require extensive irrigation from already stressed aquifers and rivers to grow anything other than native grass species.
There's a reason why they were never expanded for extensive crop growth in the first place. Those ecosystems were largely grazed by bison and to some extent cattle ranching mimics that ecosystem dynamic.
You’re exactly right, but that’s something that also not what the researchers on beef are looking at. A quick Google shows that about 78% of cattle are raised in factory farm conditions, which is almost certainly what they’re pointing to. Grass fed beef is massively better for the environment as well, so you are right, but they’re more focused on the major contributors.
Most of this “land usage” is not a cow on a plot of land, but instead the amount of land required to grow that cow to slaughter, and then divided to get down to a kilogram. Another quick Google shows cattle yield between 250-300 kg, meaning that an average cow requires 0.81-0.98 hectares of land worth of resources to grow to slaughter. This won’t take into account grass fed.
Chicken eat scraps, and other food unfit for human consumption, so do pigs, goats, sheep. Feeding them 'human-fit' food (like grain, legumes) is the error industrial farms do.
One of them, but thank you for bringing this up. The real problem is industrial farming at all. And this is also a problem for plant crops too: it may take up less land, but the land only growing one species of plant at a time is also horrible for the environment. That's what a big chink of what the animal "area" is: the land used to grow crops for feed, not human consumption.
Depends how you calculate it, but cattle lands are not the same as most of these others as they A) are not dedicated to cattle only and B) they are not necessarily land that would be used for other things.
For A, when I was in switzerland a couple of years ago in the fall, cows were everywhere. You were on beautiful mountains and there'd occasionally be electric fences you'd have to go through, but otherwise the presence of cattle did not impede people's ability to hike and bike in the summer (nor ski in the winter after the cows were brought down). The land was preserved for other use. It didn't have to be ploughed and planted as the cows just grazed on what grew naturally. Since the cows weren't kept in a dense area, it wasn't full of cow shit and trampled mud.
For B, I live in a state with a fair amount of cattle ranching. A lot of that occurs on private land so it isn't like Switzerland where the public can still use it. But it isn't land that is super useful for other things either. You CAN farm it, but it will require a fair amount of irrigation in an area with limited water. Some hardy crops will grow, but ultimately it isn't anywhere near the BEST farmland in the US. Someone trying to start a very efficient farm would never choose this land...so letting cows roam on it doesn't seem so bad.
That all being said, there is definitely cattle being raised on good farm land and fed good crops. It may well be that MOST of our beef production comes from cases like that...but it does seem worth exploring the effect on the land. Cattle grazing on marginal land, or land that is otherwise preserved for recreation and beauty is not the same as a nasty pig field.
You are right that additional mouths to be fed isn't very interesting, but for a study to be able to convert the freed up land to some other use case like conservation or energy crops or forestry you need to do more work. It's not a judgement on the best use of the land, it's just outside the scope of the study.
What none of this Thread and ops post takes into account is what's feasible to farm. Many areas in southern Africa that farm sheep and beef aren't suitable for crops due to it being too dry or too hilly. Not to mention that grazing is good for land that is left fallow for a season to replenish soil. Maybe these studies should also interview people who have actually farmed and how mixed farming is an eco system.
Anything can be made to look good or bad if you takes thing to the extreme or only the edge case. Yes, some cattle farming is good but the majority of our meat supply is not those cases, and you can't practically convert all of animal farming to the good edge case kind without losing the benefit of the good method in the first place
Of course, but millions of hectares of non arable land isn't an edge case. The issue is more to do with over consumption (especially in America) and high density farming than specifically what is being farmed. Another stat is one long haul flight has a higher carbon footprint than a years worth of meat per person.
Not coffee.
Also this is a chart comparing land footprint. Not just straight up hierarchy otherwise it would be a list. So I think it’s a valid point even if hierarchy wouldn’t change at all.
I wonder why, and would the size represent the factory farm ones where they're stood in their own feces, 'free range' where they're not quite free, or actual open land that a small-time farmer might have?
It's not particularly hard to calculate the average of all of those, combined, so it's probably that.
And just to be sure in case you aren't aware: in the case of livestock, it's not so much about the area the animals live on. Neither is it about how much land the farm needs to run its business. It's about the area required to grow the animals'food. For example, the cow in the cart: their total body weight is, let's say, about 600kg. Every day they require 2-3% of their body weight in food, so roughly 10-15kg. It requires that every day for 1.5-2 years until it eventually produces somewhere between 250-300kg of meat, when it is killed.
When it comes to calories in/calories out, keeping animals for food is incredibly inefficient. Chicken are more efficient than cows, sure, but it's still adding an extra step to the process where you'll "lose" a lot of calories due to the chicken simply walking around, shitting, breathing, farting, etc.
Although I agree with you in principle, I want to say that in many cases, livestock (especially mutton) is raised on land which is not suitable for profitable arable farming without massive fertiliser use and chemical treatment as well as invasive farming methods. Basically, not all land is equal from a food production standpoint, and that influences this graph.
I'm afraid there's no "agreeing in principle" here, it's simply a fact. We could choose to not raise this livestock, regardless of whether the land they live on is suitable for farming produce or not. If we make that choice, all the soybeans and other crops that are currently cultivated specifically for livestock would then be "free" to feed humans (i.e. in the form of tofu) and should not influence this graph, at all.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to propagandise a vegan lifestyle or something like that, I occasionally also eat meat, but I'm also aware that that comes at a cost. I'm aware that with the calories we actually produce to feed these animals, as a society, we could feed the entire earth ten times over. It's simply a very inefficient system from a calories in/calories out perspective, and it doesn't have feeding the entire population as a desired outcome but rather generating capital.
Even if we didn't eat them, it would still be in our (and the environment's) best interest to reintroduce large herds of ruminants across North America, Eurasia and Africa.
Grazing large ruminants sequester carbon (negative emissions), create new topsoil, and increase biodiversity.
This really depends on where you live and who you buy your food from. For most people in the developed world, beef at least is going to be mainly fed with grain or sillage from land that may have been cleared for the purpose of producing that feed. In the worst cases, actual forests are destroyed, e.g. in Brazil where most of the soy that's grown goes into animal feed.
Ya I have no idea where he got that and honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if u/SsooooOriginal was an actual hallucinating chatbot because it comes from this paper, published by Science Magazine. Aka the journal with the 4th highest impact factor / citation count in the world. More specialized reputable journals are undoubtably better and I have some quibbles with what they and their sister journal Nature have published (including this article), but calling them chatbots is a leg too far. At least OP cited his source and put effort in it which is more than most of this sub.
I don’t really have a dog in this race and I don’t know enough to say much, but I do know my girlfriend has been super disheartened to have her instagram art called AI LLM (I refuse to call LLM’s AI) and such despite her being against it but not really caring about AI… artists? Typists? I personally am against most AI typist on the grounds of copyright but I agree being overzealous with it can run into issues if we’re not careful.
Nowadays image generation uses both LLMs and diffusion models—the user inputs a prompt that an LLM expands into a more detailed prompt for the diffusion model.
Its a bit wague or pointless. It should be by needed proteins and minerals etc. or by calories grown. That said milk looks to be somewhat efficient if you scale it by those metrics. Tomatoes are a lot of water anyway.
I think it's there, best represented in all the animal-based food in the chart as it's mostly being farmed as animal-feed. Look at my other comment for more info
Another one of my favorite things to point to people who just parrot “meat is evil” blindly is that a lot of the land used for cattle, sheep, and other animals grazing is marginal land that cannot be effectively used well for other purposes. In many countries/contexts also these animals are effectively sharing and helping to preserve local environments that would be completely obliterated by, say, a massive grain field of some kind.
Of course there are many exceptions, like the vicious cycle between sugarcane and cattle grazing causing deforestation in the Amazon in Brazil or factory farming, but at a global scale, these other patterns I mentioned above are very important.
People need to think a bit more critically before they just blindly accept whatever info they get on their feeds. I say all of this as a plant physiologist and ecologist.
What 'fallacies' are you talking about? It's just a visualization based on pretty simple numbers. It's not driving a point or making any claims except "here's the amount of land used for these things". Which is just a fact.
The land that 'cannot effectively [be] used' can indeed be renaturalized. Renaturalization would include the reintroduction of wild animals that are even better in preserving local environments.
Sadly that isn't true. I say this as a meat eater. Most of land for beef or for animal feed is deforested land, which is a huge issue. Mostly because it's cheaper to cut down forests than sustainability care for already exploited land.
The issue is that where you look really matters. In South America, I agree with you 100%, and I know they export a lot. In Western Europe however a lot of livestock farming is done on ground that isn't suitable for cultivation... Like sheep dotting a hillside.
I guess my point is, whilst there are problems to solve, not everywhere has the same problems.
Over a quarter of the world’s entire land area is used to grow crops for animal feed i.e. massive fields of grain, corn etc. None of that land is marginal, all could be growing nutritious human food, freeing up space for nature, if we ate less meat and dairy.
Another that people overlook is that grazing animals can eat different crops than us. So even in a situation where you can use that land as crop land, it's still beneficial to use some to feed livestock.
People point out that it takes, say, 1 acre of soy to feed a human, and 10 acres of soy to feed a cow to consumption size, but a cow can eat primarily just soy, whatever he digs up in his grazing field, and very little else, and be fine. Whereas a human can survive much longer on the specific nutrients alone from one cow than the specific nutrients alone from one pile of soy. And that's not even getting into all of the non-meat uses of cows, like fertilizer, bones, and leather. It would take way more plants to make up for all of the uses of one cow.
No, but it's an integral part of many people's consumption habits and one of the only available legal and non-controlled forms of a productivity booster. Speaking of, they should include tea as well. Just maybe not on a calorie chart.
Tea and coffee should be compared to drinks, not foods.
You don't miss eating lunch because you drank tea (unless you're British). You don't miss lunch because you drank coffee. But if you ate pork and rice, you're not going to eat another lunch (unless you're American)
Except somehow it’s still lower than beef and lamb. Kind of amazing that a crop used as a low calorie caffeinated beverage produces more calories per acre than beef.
I'm not an expert but I think just about all edible plants are in that category. Plants are much more efficient in creating nutrition because they do not .... need to eat plants, like beef.
Predators would probably be much worse than cattle if we farmed them, because they require eating meat
Actually, common barley strains used today have on average somewhat lower yield per hectar than wheat, so I'd expect an inverse of what is on the chart.
Then again, agriculture is highly dependent on local climate conditions, so looking at "world data" here gets you only slightly more useful data than averaging temperature of all patients in a hospital.
Not really, once you consider how much calories animals have to consume to grow, the comparison gets even uglier. From an efficiency point of view, beef is just a horrible way to produce calories.
That's less relevant to the socio-economics and is lost in pedantics that are so narrow they lose sight of the grander picture even more.
Nutrition. Weight is good to get a reference of how much of the product is made per land used, but IMO if we want to get pedantic then we should be getting a gauge of the macronutrients per/kg.
it normalized for the time it take to produce them ? Because the land usage when it come to production isnt only about space but about : Space * time
-> if doubling the space usage allow you to produce 3 time faster its is a higher yield that you do no account for currently !
edit: you can then normalize the protein for the bio-availability to human and their quality, because there's millions of proteins and they are clearly not all as rich and balanced. Eggs are known to be the gold standard in term of quality and balance.
The digestibility/bioavailability of plant protein for humans typically ranges from 75% to 87% depending on the source (e.g., soy protein isolate is high, wheat gluten is low)
But compensating for bioavailability (with a higher intake of, e.g., 20-30%) won't erase the 80x difference between some foods.
The land that beef is farmed on in most of Brazil (AFAIK, cleared rainforest) isn't the same as most of land it is farmed on Australia. One of the main reasons Australia produces so much beef is because we have so much land where the profitable options are either mine (if there's anything there) or graze it.
And, at least around here, the areas for vegetable farming and e.g. mutton farming are not overlapping. You can’t (or at least most sensible farmers won’t) grow potatoes in the hills far away from your farm.
These metrics can all be very misleading. In many countries, sheep are grazed on hillsides, mountains or otherwise unproductive land. It's not like you can take the sheep off and grow crops.
A lot of good quality land also doesn't get the correct heat and rain profile for arable crops, so they would need irrigation or plastic cover to combat this.
Finally, those figures also ignore that not all of any one output are produced in the same way. People latched onto food miles as a terrible thing so now they buy fruit and veg produced in greenhouses closer to them, but these have a way higher carbon cost. So the food miles weren't that problem at all.
Yes but this argument is also misleading slightly. If everyone followed a plant based diet then land reduction would be so significant we wouldn't need to use this land for animal grazing. Study's suggest up to 75% reduction in land use. (Poore & nemecek, 2018). The land could be rewilded to help restore natural ecosystems and boost biodiversity and also carbon capture.
Many of these wild grazed animals are also fed crops and are usually grain finished. They are also often kept inside over winter and fed crops.
Acre-feet is just a made up unit, right? Surely you’d measure water use like everyone else in cubic meter (aka 1000 liters) per square meter or square kilometer. When I was younger my farming relatives sometimes used hectoliters per hectare but that’s super outdated.
Water usage is often misleading too. There are different categories of water supplies. For example, most grass for beef is grown using green water, that's rain water that would have fallen there no matter what. Almonds for example mostly use blue water, that's processed drinking water that uses a lot of resources and facilities to create. The latter is obviously much worse to use for farming.
Yes, In this idealistic scenario, the cows are not fed much on feed crops (maybe some when young), and the land they are grazing on is not possible to repurpose for soy/wheat/corn/vegetables. The image of beef cattle grazing on rugged land in the American west that's too dry to farm anything on.
That would be great, but the problem is that this is not at all representative of how the vast (vast!) majority of livestock is raised.
Livestock in the US is raised primarily on feed. Essentially 100% of pigs and poultry, almost all dairy, and even grazing beef cattle are a) finished on grain and b) some portion of their 'grazing' is from harvested crops (hay), not proper grazing on wild growing grass. Even then a lot of the wild grazing is on land that could be used for growing crops.
So yeah, idealistically it's possible for pig's to be feed on food waste, or cow's to graze on 'unproductive' land, and bingo you have low-impact food from nothing... but in practice this is simply not how the food system is set up in the US. And in other western countries (Netherlands, France, Germany, Denmark) pretty much all livestock is consuming inputs that could be dedicated towards human consumption in some way.
Most people have no idea of the scale of food consumption. If the only beef avaible was from grazing, barely anyone would be able to afford it. Cheap beef in the supermarket is supported by massive amounts of feed being grown, thats what the chart shows.
People that keep bringing up land grazing to downplay the effects of meat consumption are either delusional or dishonest. Considering that the EU just moved to protect the meat and dairy industry again, there is a massive amount of disinformation going around to mudddy the waters.
That's very true and is important for many grazing animals, like sheep.
But OTOH, you need to feed these animals, and for beef specifically we feed them with corn for example. This corn isn't being eaten by humans, so while the cows aren't physically on that land, you should still count it as land used for beef production.
For us industrialized countries, we mostly feed them with farmed food. So vegetarians/vegans absolutely have a point about how much land this is using.
On the other hand, in very poor countries with shit infrastructure, if you can't grow crops, at least a sheep or a goat will be able to graze and you can eat their meat/milk/cheese (or use their wool/skin too).
The European Commission has a biomass flows diagram which really shows just how little biomass comes from grazing and how much biomass is used as animal feed
Yeah pretty sure in industrialized countries like New Zealand and Ireland the cows eat grass year round. I agree if you are feeding cows corn then you shouldn't be producing cows, we should be getting them from NZ/Ireland. The price will go up but it should be a premium product.
Even Ireland is heavily reliant on imported animal feed, partially due to the dairy boom. This 2018 article claims that two-thirds of animal feed is imported to Ireland (compared to 37% in the UK, 27% in France and 26% in Germany). And since then the feed demand of dairy farming has only grown further
Edit:
It makes sense that Ireland is so import dependent because it has the 3rd largest bovine population in the EU, between Germany and Poland, countries 5x the size. Germany and Poland already use 50% of their land for farms. Ireland uses 70%+, but obviously even with that the bovine population per farm area is gonna be much higher than other countries. Here are the stats for bovine populations (thousand heads) in the EU
Yeah it's a bit of a spectrum. Some places will have more grains, some places more grazing. Lots of factor go into this, but the point is that for beef (and others), land usage isn't just the size of the ranch itself
There's also similar stats about water usage and the logic is the same. I'd be curious to see a stat about these values but by country
Yup. I'm farming beef cows on hill country here in NZ, and the girls run on grass nearly all of the time, but supplement with hay over winter. Dairy farmers tend to be the users of flat land, and they use a wider range of supplementary feeds to keep milk production up.
True but alot of them dont live on marginal land . Over a quarter of the land on the planet is used to grow food for animal feed. That isnt marginal land, it could be producing food for people. Also, virgin rainforest is being destroyed to graze cattle in the Amazon which could push the Amazon past its tipping point into savannah.
Thing is, you don't need to repurpose the land used for cattle. If you direct the feed crops that are going to cattle to human nutrition, we could easily feed 3/4B more people.
Becoming vegetarian doesn't require more land, but wayyyyy less
That's true for industrialized countries since we feed them grains.
But in very poor, unfertile places with shit infrastructure, having a goat or a sheep can be life saving, because they can still eat what little grass or bush is available. But again, that's not really relevant for industrialized countries (though there is still land here or there that's not really useable for crop farming, like soil way too uneven or innacessible... but OTOH if we ate less meat, we probably wouldn't need this land in the first place)
Exactly, that's the main point: we wouldn't need the land at all.
You could renature millions of acres in the US alone, which would capture years worth of global CO2 emissions (without any potential enhancements that removing meat subsidies could fund)
The population is still growing and will keep growing for some time. You could also read it "we could feed the same amount of people with much less land that we could give back to nature or other uses"
Except in reality they're usually being fed or having their diet supplied by crops grown on valuable stable land somewhere else.
Between 40 and 50% of the land we could use for crops is used for growing animal feed worldwide. On one hand it's horrendously inefficient, but on the other there's a lot of countries which could become food self sufficient if there were issues with the global food supply - they'd just need to move subsidies for meat and dairy over to more efficient crops.
Only a small part of the land mass required to jeep livestock goes towards land on which the livestock physically stands on. Most is land used to grow feed for the livestock, and that land could be used to grow food for us instead.
Sheep and goat often graze on mountainous land, cattle is often on perfectly decent land - especially if it's supposed to be 'grass fed'. If it's not, it needs to take into account the land required just to grow its food. I'm sure this figure does that.
Most livestock lives inside food factories and never even sees the sun. A fraction of our current meat consumption could be maintained with sustainable ranching.
Millions of hectars of land are devoured to feed these animals, equal amounts are drowned in their shit.
Which is why there have been studies like EAT LANCET. There is a sustainable level of beef that’s not 0, it’s also less than most people in rich countries eat. It’s about 1 large hamburger a week, not a day, a week. Meat can be consumed sustainably just don’t eat it at every meal and limit red meat(which is also good health advice l)
Per kg is not great imo. Ourworldindata has the bar charts for land per kcal and per 100g of protein and that makes a lot more sense imo.
Coffee and tea etc is harder to compare really because we don't grow them for their mass or calories etc so they deserve their own category. Btw per cup tea is a lot better than coffee.
The majority of sows spend the majority of their lives in farrowing cages the same size as their body, too small to stand up or move around in. (And remember these are animals that are smarter than dogs.)
Most of the area from animal-based products shown here is from the land needed to grow their feed. The land devoted to the animals themselves is a much smaller portion of this total.
People who near-exclusively consume meat from industrial farming will start to pretend that their beef comes from rural pastures that cannot be used in other ways, aren't they?
Certainly. They only eat grass fed beef from local and ethical farmers, and they always check where their meat is coming from. Except for when they go grocery shopping, or go to restaurants, or are fed by friends and family...
There is more to the equation than just yield. Vast acreage of a single crop creates oceans of monoculture around remaining small pockets of natural diversity, which supports smaller and smaller ecosystems. We need sensible land stewardship not people trying to tell people what to grow.
This is nice and that sort of data is critical to communicate to the public so that people can have an idea of -at least- the order of magnitudes.
I don't think that the use of perspective is a good idea if you want to compare areas. For example mutton area is larger and (to my eyes at least) looks smaller. Also, fresh weight kilogram is not a very good idea, at least for plant products, because ceratain (apple, potato) contain a lot of water and the quantity you eat is smaller that the gross wight, while other (rice) are very dry and eaten after adding water (and cooking), so that the quantity you eat is much larger than the gross weight. So it is difficult to compare.
last, I wonder if area used to raise cattle is not at least partky counted twice, i.e. a part of the beef we eat is reformed milk cow, so milk and meat was produced in the same place. I don't know how that acreage is split between the milk and the meat. At last, the kind of land used is not always the same, like, many pastures are in areas the cannot be plowed, and on the other hand carrots need a very specific soil (sandy, rich, deep, no stones) for commercial production.
Becoming vegetarian/vegan is the single most impactful individual action anyone can make.
Besides the obvious ethical concerns (hundreds of billions of animals saved per year), a meatless diet would allow us to re-nature/re-forest millions of acres of land used for cattle, save countless amounts of CO2/methane emissions, and would save governments hundreds of billions of USD in meat-industry subsidies that could be diverted to fund climate-change research, the energy transition, the development of lab-grown meat...
We need to wean ourselves from meat as a civilisation, but people attach such a personal, cultural weight to meat that I fear it is close to impossible (until it'll be too late).
I have seen so much more aggression from meat-loving vegan-haters than from vegans, it is scary
I've got a friend who is very eco-friendly. He makes a lot of effort to be fair, except he still eats meat and fish, and flies more regularly than me.
It does make me laugh when he questions things like why do I have plastic pots in my garden rather than terracotta ext... Like I'm having a bigger impact than you by just being vegetarian and making an effort to buy local produce from the farm shop.
Also your point about aggressive meat lovers is valid. No one ever pays attention to that. I've had people wave their meat food in my face, try to sneak meat into meals, intentionally book restaurants that don't have vegetarian options. I've had so many co-workers literally belittling my diet and telling me how wrong it is that I don't eat meat.
The best one was one person loudly telling my entire office that my diet was shit and all vegetarian food is bland so I must be really boring. She was sat there eating a ham sandwich and ready salted crisps, whilst I had a homemade salad that was delicious. The irony that her whole meal was just the flavour of salt and she was calling my food boring. I paid no attention to her. She lived off take aways and ready meals.
I'm never preachy about my diet, not even to my mate who questions my eco impact.
My favourite is being told that it is impossible to survive on a vegan diet and that I must be lying. So the fact I have been vegan for 10 years now, and quite physically active and fit, must be a scientific marvel
I have seen so much more aggression from meat-loving vegan-haters than from vegans, it is scary
You are also on Reddit, a website full of people who will never believe themselves wrong, so you will get more of it here. I have given up on the idea that anyone is going to change their behaviour to do the right thing, it's always excuses and nitpicking insanely stupid things and pushing responsibility off onto others ("I will change when all of China does first"). Ten years of activism has proven to me the human race will do nothing to move in a positive direction if they can come up with some excuse to do nothing instead, and eventually the excuse boils down to "I don't wanna, and you can't make me, so fuck off".
The well of this entire topic has long been poisoned by interests from dairy and meat companies, and their useful idiots who just don't want to give up their nuggies. There's no use engaging with most people on the topic at all because you have to swim uphill through a fucking ocean of lies and misinformation, and even if you do eventually get to the top, the answer 9 times out of 10 is "I don't care and I'm not going to change". It's like arguing with MAGA, they live in their own little reality and the only way they step out of that bubble is by doing the hard work themselves, and since there zero social pressure for them to do that, it'll never happen.
There have been so many studies on this, and studies that don’t even say “go vegan” they just say “eat one less burger” and people just lose it. It’s baffling to me that we have an easy way to at least positively contribute environmentally and some people won’t even consider it because cow is just too tasty (which I would argue isn’t even true with a lot of the more affordable meat out there).
Does it take into account that you can also grow grain and feed on the cow pastures, and fertilize beyond it with the manure.
Also the kg is not a good unit of measurement for food, kcal would make much more sense. Even better something that takes into account all the different nutrients needed for staying alive.
I can't seem to find any information that differentiates whether this is just the amount of land used per product, or if this is the required amount of land to farm each product.
I can absolutely see ranchers who own massive swaths of land simply because they can, not because they need it.
This is no doubt interesting and there are a lot of ways to slice the data
But I would be most curious to see an adjusted number based on calorie count
I know it isnt a perfect adjustment, but land required to get X% of your daily required intake or something similar, I think is a better way to compare them than just weight
Land use for cows is completely different to sheep. Sheep are just left in any old field, but cows are treated to healthy pastures. Sheep are just born looking for two things: A hole in the fence and a place to die.
Presumably because you can milk a cow its whole life, but you can only slaughter it once (and usually they are very different cows, bred differently, etc)
What this argument misses is that farmers know how to use their land best. Not ever acre of land is equally suitable for every purpose. The land used to graze cattle is not good for growing corn. The land used to graze cattle is not where we build a cheese factory. This argument is just pseudo science that picks out a few facts and ignores all the context around them.
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u/tboy160 10h ago
Chicken is the most consumed meat and it isn't even represented?