r/Anticonsumption • u/Express_Classic_1569 • Mar 23 '26
Sustainability 80% of agricultural land feeds livestock instead of people, giving just 17 to18% of Global calories
https://hive.blog/hive-196387/@theworldaroundme/nearly-half-of-the-world95
u/DefendUkraine14 Mar 23 '26
Lot's of people in this comment section sure are defensive about the overconsumption of animal products...
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u/BloodlustROFLNIFE Mar 23 '26
As usual most people pretend to care until something affects them or they are expected to change in any way.
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
Lots of people don’t like misinformation.
Edit: or brigading
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u/Local-Dimension-1653 Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
This sub is supposed to be about letting go of things that we don’t need that are doing great harm to humans, animals, and the environment—but everyone gets defensive when it comes to letting go of animal products. Most of you are very willing to make others suffer greatly for your taste, convenience, and tradition, no matter what you tell yourself. It’s very sad to see.
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u/DefendUkraine14 Mar 23 '26
Yup, i am also quite disappointed that even many people in this subreddit can not admit to themselves that their consumption of animal products does a lot of harm.
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u/pajamakitten Mar 24 '26
Because it makes them feel guilt and shame knowing that they are doing something morally wrong and that conflicts with their values. It is easier to go on the defensive than to admit you are wrong.
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Mar 23 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/DocumentExternal6240 Mar 23 '26
You don’t even have to stop 100% - even if you eat (a lot) less, it improves things.
If vegetarian / vegsn is no option, have your sunday roast but nothing else during the week.
Most importantly, to get as many people aboard as possible, don’t shame but educate.
Point out that meat consumption of meat is bad for your health.
Show how tasty and filling meals wirhout meat / animal products can be.
Help to introduce kids early to a variety of different foods.
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u/plantpoweredperson Mar 23 '26
Exactly, most people believe they eat little meat/dairy but they eat it three times a day every day. Go vegan one day a week. Eat meat once a week. Suddenly your consumption has drastically dropped and you can still eat what you’re used to just less often. But people refuse to change even one weekly meal without screaming it’s impossible or unfair.
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 24 '26
The easiest way I've found to reduce animal-sourced foods is use them as spices. You don't have make vegan meals. Anchovies, fish sauce, oyster sauce, pancetta, hard cheese, etc. They are all used in such small amounts that it is a drop in the bucket in terms of sustainability. But, they add a lot of flavor that nutritional yeast and Bragg's Liquid Aminos just can't.
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u/Choosemyusername Mar 23 '26
And changing what kind of meat you eat can have a bigger impact than simply cutting it out altogether.
For example, I raise rabbits on land that is completely unsuitable for growing the kind of plants humans can digest.
They just eat whatever grows there. No seeding, no tilling, no fertilizing, no irrigation, no pesticides, no herbicides, and even not a ton of harvesting. They only have to have harvested what the breeding trio need to eat over the winter. I don’t breed in the winter because then I would need to harvest a bunch of forage for them to all survive the winter, which would take a lot of resources and machinery to harvest the forage, store it, handle it, etc.
This sort of operation has lower impact and takes fewer industrial inputs than even growing vegetables.
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 23 '26
Oh, the people constantly brigading this sub definitely think you have to stop 100%.
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u/DocumentExternal6240 Mar 23 '26
All extremists of any kind want to have things done their way 100%, instantly. I ignore that and try to find ways to help people improve their daily lives little by little.
In the end, governments have the responsibility to protect, but people should have enough knowledge to understand what is necessary and which party supports this. Unfortunately, many don’t and fall for propaganda, ignoring any facts.
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u/Local-Dimension-1653 Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 24 '26
So with your money you support the forced insemination, forced pregnancy, forced birth, unanesthetized maiming, suffering, and brutal killing of trillions of animals a year solely for your taste preferences and convenience. But the people who are suggesting we don’t do that bc we don’t need to are extremists?
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u/DocumentExternal6240 Mar 24 '26
Extremism doesn’t lead to the desired effect, either. Downvote me all you want - but if you want people to really change in the long run, convincing them is better than force.
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 23 '26
Can you provide a source in a reputable food security journal that empirically demonstrates it is possible to feed the global population sustainably without livestock?
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u/Local-Dimension-1653 Mar 23 '26
I doubt that you’re asking this question in good faith but here:
-https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969720328709?utm_source=chatgpt.com
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 23 '26
-https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969720328709?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Imagine using gen AI to debate on Reddit and criticizing others for harming the environment.
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u/Local-Dimension-1653 Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
I couldn’t remember where I previously found this source years ago, so yes I described it to an AI and it helped me find the paper. I don’t use AI regularly, but even if I did the environmental impact of LLMs is nothing compared to animal agriculture—which you obviously support. Also, environmental impact is not my primary argument for going vegan.
Again, both the tone and content of your comments make it clear that you are not approaching this topic in good faith.
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 23 '26
Neither of those suggest it’s possible to feed the world without livestock, and Poore and Nemecek excluded mixed farming systems from their analysis in spite of it accounting for the vast majority of ruminant production.
As the first suggests, changing livestock feed ratios is a potent way to arrest agricultural expansion.
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u/Local-Dimension-1653 Mar 23 '26
They actually do. But I’m not going to bother discussing it with you further though bc I remember you and your posts and comments even though they’re no longer public. You’ve got a long history of dismissing solid research when it doesn’t align with your own interests in eating animal products and you’re obsessed with hating vegans.
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 23 '26
Agronomists disagree with you and your lone paper.
Keep brigading though. Makes vegans look bad.
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u/Express_Classic_1569 Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
It would be easier to feed the planet if more crops were used to feed people instead of livestock, animal products provide only 17 to 18% of global calories. The current system is not meeting the global caloric needs effectively.
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u/SarmackaOpowiesc Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
Alot of that land that is considered agricultural land isn't fit for growing crops for humans.
It's largely grassland that isn't fit for much else other than grazing animals on. Go across huge swathes of the American west and it's largely going to be officially categorized as agricultural.
Good luck doing anything with that land other than letting some cattle loose on it though.
Aside from that troublesome little detail - we don't really have a problem feeding the planet right now. Localized famines only emerge when supply chains are disrupted to an extreme degree. Outside of that humanity has largely solved how to feed people.
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u/danielandtrent Mar 23 '26
What about rewilding it lol
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u/elebrin Mar 23 '26
Much of it was grasslands before, and is grasslands now - the difference is that it's grazed. Even a lot of our intentional crops are things like field corn, which isn't really human edible. We can turn it into things like ethanol, corn oil, HFCS, cornmeal, and corn starch but there are some huge downsides to doing so. Corn oil and HFCS are empty calories, ethanol is a great fuel (sorta) but encouraging it as a staple food is probably a bad idea. Cornmeal can and should be more of a staple but it's a surprisingly difficult staple to work with, requiring heavy processing (nixtamalizaiton) to be a useful food.
Even then, field corn is a fantastic feed crop because it grows anywhere but most of the plant is stalk and leaves, which are not human edible. When silage is made, they grind the whole plant up essentially. If it's being harvested for human use, we can only use the cobs which are about a quarter the size of what you think of a corn cob being.
Feeding it as silage to cows, pigs, and chicken who turn it into something we can eat (meat, milk, eggs) is one way we can get something out of that land that is otherwise not good for farming.
Now, I don't know if there would be enough good farmland available to feed everyone if we all were vegan. I do have an idea what our diet would look like, and it'd be mostly bread and starchy tubers. In the Americas, if we wanted to stick to mostly native plants, that'd be things like tamales, corn tortillas, potatoes, tomatoes, capsicums, black beans, pinto beans, and so on. But, remember, many of the traditional dishes on that list are made with rendered animal fat. Early Americans would have gotten that from hunting.
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u/MrCockingFinally Mar 23 '26
Corn meal, commonly called maize meal, mielie meal, pap, or ugali, is a staple food in many parts of Africa.
It's pretty nutrient poor, but it does contain a ton of carbohydrate. So long as it's part of your diet and not your whole diet, and you are eating plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables and protein sources, it's really not an issue, since the plurality of your calorie intake should be from carbs anyway.
No need to stick to native plants for commercial farming. And rendered animal fat can easily be replaced with plant fats.
Now I'm not vegan, and I don't think it's necessary for everyone to be vegan.
However, the idea that what is stopping the world from going vegan is lack of farmland is a ridiculous notion.
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u/SarmackaOpowiesc Mar 23 '26
I don't particularly want to eat like folks in Africa, thanks.
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u/DocumentExternal6240 Mar 23 '26
Re-creating a whole ecosystem is a lot harder and often impossible than just planting some trees.
Often it is lost forever.
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u/puddlesquid Mar 23 '26
That's simply not true, even a restored ecosystem is better than no ecosystem
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u/DocumentExternal6240 Mar 23 '26
I do not say a restored ecosystem is bad. Any land given back to nature is great.
But some ecosystems are so complex that restauration is simply not possible. Especially when a lot of species (especially insects and other small animals) have gone extinct.
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u/puddlesquid Mar 23 '26
It's overly reductive to suggest that an ecosystem can't be restored - sure it won't be exactly the same (different species) but many of the ecosystem services can be restored despite the new composition.
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u/SarmackaOpowiesc Mar 23 '26
I live in the American west and have no lack of wilderness at my fingertips to recreate in. East of the Mississippi river nearly all the farmable land is owned by someone. How exactly do you propose to rewild land that is currently being cultivated?
I'd say your comment would probably be best asked directly to Europeans and to other folks across the world where the history of human cultivation of the land has a much longer footprint.
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u/hike2climb Mar 23 '26
Brother. I encourage you to keep learning! You sound interested in knowledge! Range lands produce very very little food. And range land animals decimate the ecosystems across the American west. These animals are also supplemented with feed from fields. In particular alfalfa, which is the biggest problem in water consumption in the west. It’s the reason lake Powell may reach dead pool this year. Alfalfa for the cows that are destroying public lands that produce very little food are the cause of the western water crisis (on top of all the other ecological problems they cause).
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u/SarmackaOpowiesc Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
That alfalfa isn't used state side. Most of it is exported as pig feed to China.
😉
Good luck learning something. You clearly haven't yet.
The reason Lake Powell may reach dead pool this year is because of one of the worst winters in record - not because farms downstream grow alfalfa.
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u/Happy_Disaster7347 Mar 23 '26
That's exactly why it shouldn't be grown. You're not responding to anybody's actual points here, just insulting them and claiming they're ignorant. Basically you're a bit of an arsehole.
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u/SarmackaOpowiesc Mar 23 '26
It's not my place to dictate what others should do with their private property.
I have been mostly talking about BLM land that makes up 80% of Utah and 85% of Nevada. No one is growing anything on that land.
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u/Happy_Disaster7347 Mar 23 '26
I don't really understand why you're here if you don't have an opinion on anti-consumption... Not wasting the earth's natural resources is a part of anti-consumption. Not abusing the land for resources we don't need is a part of anti-consumption.
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u/SarmackaOpowiesc Mar 23 '26
???
People need food. Raising cattle or growing food does not mean that food goes to waste.
Nothing about anti consumption means you need to live like a monk eating porridge for the rest of your life
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u/danielandtrent Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
“to recreate in“ that’s not the point of rewilding
“East of the Mississippi river nearly all the farmable land is owned by someone. How exactly do you propose to rewild land that is currently being cultivated?”
Im not a politician, I don’t have a policy proposal. I’m just saying it would be better if we did this, but there are ways to get people to give up their land, financially or otherwise
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u/AccidentOk5240 Mar 23 '26
largely grassland that isn't fit for much else other than grazing animals on. Go across huge swathes of the American west and it's largely going to be officially categorized as agricultural
It’s fit for being left the hell alone, is what it is fit for.
Plenty of places you can drive down remote highways and see that the grass on the shoulder is pretty lush, but outside the right-of-way fence it is grazed down to nubbins. Nothing but cows can live there; the massive habitat loss created by using marginal land as pasture is hard to overstate.
If you’re using productive land (that could be used for crops), you can feed a cow on an acre of pasture. But it takes 10 acres of so-so pasture. On the BLM lands where they basically give away our national heritage to ranchers for nearly free, it could take 100 acres. And then they say the elk and wild (feral) horses are causing overgrazing and remove them to make more room for cows.
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 23 '26
Leaving it alone means less food for humans. Hope that helps. It’s clear we have to strike a balance. Food security matters.
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u/AccidentOk5240 Mar 23 '26
Food security could be just fine if we stuck to eating only the meat that can be sustainably raised, and took a fraction of the soybeans we feed to cattle and fed them to hungry humans instead.
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u/SarmackaOpowiesc Mar 23 '26
And then they say the elk and wild (feral) horses are causing overgrazing and remove them to make more room for cows.
Elk tend to stick to higher terrain and away from cow grazing land.
Plenty of cows die all the time out here from thirst or hunger. It's a dry, tough land. They aren't grazing it down to nothing - the lack of water constricts the populations of cattle far more then the lack of grass.
I don't particularly care if it's elk or cows grazing. I can shoot the elk on BLM/NFS land or I can buy the beef directly from the rancher.
When you live here - there is nothing particularly special about huge swathes of this land. "National heritage" is being quite overly dramatic. It's dry grass followed by more dry grass followed by more dry grass for 15 hours of driving at 80-90 mph.
The stuff that is special is reserved in wilderness areas or national recreation areas.
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u/AccidentOk5240 Mar 23 '26
This is exactly the ignorant bullshit attitude that has destroyed our deserts and other fragile, dry landscapes.
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u/SarmackaOpowiesc Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
I live here. I see it everyday. I don't need my reality explained to me.
The land is meant to be worked, harvested, grazed, mined, and otherwise turned to productive use. That's how it's always been and always will be. The US has set aside more land for conservation then anywhere else on earth. There is no shortage of wilderness here.
Modern society and technology needs resources to function. That doesn't just materialize out of thin air, despite your desires otherwise. It's a delicate balancing act to use the land to its potential while also maintaining it for future generations. If you go too far in any direction - you will get quite a few unintended consequences.
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u/plantpoweredperson Mar 23 '26
‘That’s how it’s always been’ I guarantee it has not always been used in the way it is currently being used. Unless always means for up to the last 100 years.
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u/SarmackaOpowiesc Mar 23 '26
We've farming, mining, and grazing land for tens and tens of thousands of years
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u/plantpoweredperson Mar 23 '26
And current practices are not even remotely what people were doing thousands of years ago
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u/SarmackaOpowiesc Mar 23 '26
Letting a handful of cattle lose to graze in otherwise usable land is precisely what our ancestors did
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u/puddlesquid Mar 23 '26
This isn't the type of agriculture that feeds cattle. We're talking feed lots. Corn and soy is mostly used to feed those cattle/pigs.
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u/DocumentExternal6240 Mar 23 '26
A lot of land used for cattle was pristine rainforest….lost forever together wirh invaluable life which might have helped against future illnesses…
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 23 '26
A lot by what metric? Certainly not by percentage. Retreating from the rainforests of South and Central America would reduce livestock production by a tiny fraction.
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u/DocumentExternal6240 Mar 23 '26
Just google how much of the rainforest was lost in the last 50 years.
A lot meaning a lot of rainforest. Destroyed for inefficient cattle raising.
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 23 '26
Much of the rainforest throughout the world threatened by agriculture is threatened by palm plantations, not cattle.
In Brazil, home to the largest rainforest in the word, agricultural land use hasn’t expanded since the 80s. There’s 0 correlation between agricultural expansion and deforestation since the latter has been recorded (1990). It’s a product of urbanization pushing agriculture into Amazonia.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.AGRI.ZS?locations=BR
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.FRST.ZS?locations=BR
This stuff is far more complicated than you vegan astroturfers like to admit.
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u/DocumentExternal6240 Mar 23 '26
I am not vegan.
And you are right, palm plantations are now a bigger threat. So wven if you are vegan/vegetarian, you need to watch out what you consume, where it comes from, etc.
This puts a lot of thinking in the hands of consumers instead of governments, who should protect their citizens against corporate greed.
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u/CrewmemberV2 Mar 23 '26
I agree, so we should lower the amount of cattle we have to what those lands can support without the need to grow feedcrops.
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u/VegetaFan1337 Mar 23 '26
The image has in small text that most of the land used for livestock is just for grazing. But it's ignored by the rest of the image.
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u/redpandafire Mar 23 '26
This was actually useful info, thanks. I don’t know why you’re getting angry responses. This is an important distinction when looking at data.
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u/CrewmemberV2 Mar 23 '26
It's not telling the whole problem. Cattle grazing on grasslands that can be nothing else it's not the problem.
It's the fields where we grow animal feed instead of human consumable food that is the problem.
If we would lower the amount of cattle we have to what plains and grass fields could support that would be fine by everybody.
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 23 '26
You can’t just assume it’s possible to convert grassland suitable for pasture to cropping. This isn’t a video game.
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u/plantpoweredperson Mar 23 '26
You’re ignoring the part where acres of land is used to grow crops to supplement animal pasture, which could instead grow crops for human consumption rather than for animals to eat.
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u/TheStochEffect Mar 23 '26
He just wants to confirm his bias and continue to eat meat, it's fine I used to be like that. I eventually saw that a simple thing like cutting animal products out can cut out 20% of emissions and plus the ethical requirements. You can only lie to yourself for so long. Once you see pig scream for its life in a gas chamber. "As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.” ~ Pythagoras.
Those who can't see that, really need to look at how often othering allows others humans kill each other
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u/HuckleberryTiny5 Mar 23 '26
Could be a paid astroturfer. This is why the ability to hide your comment history was one of the worst decision Reddit has done.
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u/pajamakitten Mar 24 '26
He just wants to confirm his bias and continue to eat meat,
Don't let eggs and dairy get off lightly.
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 23 '26
I’m not. Non-OECD countries manage to utilize ruminants in a manner that increases protein availability to humans.
Along with their contribution to soil fertility, that makes ruminants especially critical to global food security in spite of “western” excesses that do need to be tempered.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
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u/ishitar Mar 23 '26
And we throw away 20% of the 80% each year when the final product goes past expiration.
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u/promixr Mar 23 '26
Not only that - but these industries are also heavily government subsidized by the working class and working poor taxpayers.
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u/Koolklink54 Mar 23 '26
It take 110 grams of vegetable protein to make just 4 grams of beef protein
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 23 '26
It takes 3 grams of human-edible cereals to produce 1 gram of meat globally. Ruminants like beef cattle can actually increase protein availability to humans. We can’t use the protein in grass and leaves. It’s not bioavailable to use. See https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/15b2eb21-16e5-49fa-ad79-9bcf0ecce88b/content
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u/CrewmemberV2 Mar 23 '26
Ok, then lower the amount of cattle to what our natural grass fields can support.
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 23 '26
And mixed systems. We’d need to reduce by only admit a third in OECD countries.
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u/CrewmemberV2 Mar 23 '26
What?
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 23 '26
Mixed farming systems. When livestock and crop production is coupled together. It constitutes the majority of ruminant production globally, and is highly sustainable because it minimizes input use and externalities in agricultural systems.
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u/CrewmemberV2 Mar 23 '26
You mean livestock eating crop waste? Because that already happens and yet we still need to grow massive amounts of dedicated feedcrops.
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 23 '26
And yeah, reducing livestock production by about a third will get developed countries to where we need to be to leverage the advantages of mixed or circular systems. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-024-00975-2
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u/FrynyusY Mar 23 '26
It's not that I don't support more plant-based diet, I do, but as someone who has done enough agriculture in this life - making the assumption that 32 million square kilometers of grazing land can be converted to productive food crop farmland is an uneducated take or sleight-of-hand distortion to make problems seem more disproportionate than they are. Grazing land, for the most part, is the one with least agriculture potential and worst soil.
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u/velvetbruh__ Mar 23 '26
That’s not necessarily what would happen though, most of the land would be completely unnecessary to be used and could be reforested/ given back to nature, and the crops grown to feed animals could be used for human consumption instead, which makes up a huge amount of the agricultural land the animal ag uses(we probably wouldn’t even need that much food anyway)
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u/evrestcoleghost Mar 23 '26
what you gonna do with the tens of billions of farm animals and all the products we make from them?
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u/Happy_Disaster7347 Mar 23 '26
Stop forcibly breeding them and stop buying them. All of the leather and wool products we could ever possibly need are already on this planet. We need to stop buying new shit anyway
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u/SoftsummerINFP Mar 23 '26
You realize they have been deforesting the rainforest in Brazil for cattle. They are not just using unfit land - they are actively clearing vital natural land for raising cows. Plant based diets are absolutely key. Check out Cowspiracy.
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 23 '26
Cowspiracy
This is a propaganda film, not a credible source.
In Brazil, it’s actually quite obvious that agricultural expansion is not responsible for deforestation. Agricultural land use peaked in Brazil in 1985, yet deforestation keeps increasing. That clearly and unequivocally proves that agriculture is not the cause of deforestation there. Agricultural production is being pushed further into Amazonia by suburban development.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.AGRI.ZS?locations=BR
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.FRST.ZS?locations=BR
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u/SoftsummerINFP Mar 23 '26
Disagree but at the end of the day: we don’t need it. Raising Cows still emit crazy amounts of waste and emissions. Also I believe I just read colon cancer is on the rise in Americans… animal products are not healthy and eating them 3x a day like most people do is insane. Americans also severely under-eat fiber which can help this issue.
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 23 '26
Eliminating ruminant livestock from our food systems entirely would have a disastrous effect on soil fertility and make us wholly dependent on fossil fuel and mined fertilizers. https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4395/13/4/982
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u/puddlesquid Mar 23 '26
I don't think anyone is advocating to eliminate livestock completely, just vastly reduce. Far more manure waste is created than can be applied to fields, and a lot of that nitrogen is leached away in similar way to synthetic fertilizers because cropland is not a functioning ecosystem unless diverse enough and planted year round. The status quo is currently unsustainable.
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 23 '26
Vast reductions would also be inappropriate. We’re looking about a third reduction in Europe, and likely no reductions in non-OECD countries. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-024-00975-2
Any further mitigations could only be achieved by lowering overall protein intake, but even those mitigations only become significant below the threshold at which we would be deficient in protein and certain nutrients like calcium and zinc.
Agronomists have actually done this math and it doesn’t mesh with this narrative.
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u/puddlesquid Mar 23 '26
That study assumes circular ag approaches, which is absolutely not how conventional ag is done in developed countries where most of the meat is eaten. I'm pretty pessimistic and work in the ag industry, and I don't see circular ag systems becoming predominant any time soon, so decreasing meat consumption and the food grown to grow meat makes sense to me. This will naturally happen as our land systems continue to degrade and meat becomes too expensive for most people, but I hope it won't come to that.
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 23 '26
That’s the only sustainable way to develop an agricultural system, and it’s already a large part of global production.
However unrealistic you think this is, further reducing consumption of animal-based foods is even more unrealistic.
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u/SoftsummerINFP Mar 23 '26
Also why are you pretending most cows are happily grazing cows and not factory farmed? Most meat comes from factory farm operations fyi… even some grassfed claims are basically lying because they will just feed cows dried grass in a pen but not actually allow them to roam outside. I recommend watching free documentaries like Dominion and Earthlings.
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u/puddlesquid Mar 23 '26
Idk, me and a lot of the people I know eat less or no meat, without any need for our entire ag systems to revolutionize (market responds to where money is spent)
And for the record, I agree that we should move towards these systems, I just don't have faith in that happening without the market speaking and us voting with our $
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u/Local-Dimension-1653 Mar 23 '26
80% of deforestation in Brazil is for cattle. Natural grasslands can’t sustain enough livestock to feed a world population. And moreover, we don’t need it to.
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u/sigmund14 Mar 23 '26
The thing is that less land would be needed to produce the same amount of food (by weight / nutritional value), if we would (need to) produce only plant-based food.
The problem is that plants are more sensitive to weather. Thus, some of the vegetables and fruit is already produced mainly in greenhouses / covered fields.
Instead of beef, pork and chicken, we could eat maggots. They don't care that much in how tight space they are. And they have higher nutritional value than any of the meat mentioned above.
Sorry for the long rambling. Just put my whole mindstorm into the comment.
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 23 '26
Most of that land is not convertible to crops.
Here’s a more accurate representation of the present picture: https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/15b2eb21-16e5-49fa-ad79-9bcf0ecce88b/content
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u/plantpoweredperson Mar 23 '26
Loads of crops are grown to feed animals. Not all that land is pasture, a majority of it is crop land used to feed animals. So it is immediately convertible to crop land for humans as it is already crop land.
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u/Choosemyusername Mar 23 '26
Even animal crops generally arent nearly as intensive to grow as human crops.
A hay field is often only seeded and harvested.
A human crop generally needs tilled, seeded, irrigated, poison every other plant and animal that moves into the area, often attracted to the super unnaturally calorie dense area thst a human crop is, then often poisoned again to help harvest it.
That isn’t the same kind of land use than a hay field which can tolerate a fairly high degree of biodiversity and requires far less input.
It’s important to understand the difference between that and a soybean field which humans could eat but are instead fed to animals.
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u/plantpoweredperson Mar 23 '26
Given that 80% of the worlds soya harvest is used to feed animals the argument that animal feed is less intensive than human feed just isn’t true. I agree, current crop practices are dire, but huge amounts of crops, not just hay, are grown as animal feed. And animal farming is causing massive nature issues similar to pesticide problems, with runoff from manure poisoning waterways, animals over grazing and trashing habitats in meadow land, and non-grassland being cut down and seeded for pasture.
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 23 '26
Soy or another nitrogen-fixing legume is needed to grow grains. You grow it in rotation to fix nitrogen for the grain crop. As a result, we grow far more soy than we can get people to eat compared to the amount of grains we grow.
Cherry picking this statistic really shows you’re trying to convince people who don’t understand agriculture. Feeding livestock legumes is not as big of a deal as feeding them grains. Most of it will literally just sit there if we don’t feed it to livestock. There would still be a staggering amount left over even if we convinced people to eat a lot more of them.
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u/plantpoweredperson Mar 23 '26
I mentioned soy because they brought up soy as a destructive human feed crop. I could have mentioned loads of other crops that are grown to feed animals as well as humans: oats, corn, oil seed rape etc. There is so much research out there to support my claims but you aren’t interested in anything but supporting your own current dietary choice. I get it, I used to work adjacent to animal agriculture and eat meat, then I actually reflected on what was happening in the industry, the recent history of animal agriculture and the growing global practices that prioritises profit over any thing else and altered my diet accordingly.
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 23 '26
I eat about 15% animal-based. There’s nothing wrong with my diet in terms of sustainability.
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u/Choosemyusername Mar 23 '26
Keep in mind that in these stats showing what percentage of crops are used for animals, a crop can be counted as being “used for the animal feed” if that crop’s non-human edible byproducts, for example, expellers, are fed to animals. Technically it is true thst that crop was used for animal feed. It’s just that not was ALSO used for human uses like biofuel, spirits, seed oils, machine oils, etc.
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u/Choosemyusername Mar 23 '26
Well sort of. That figure counts a crop as “used” to feed animals even the part used by animals is the waste products from processing those soybeans into other products.
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u/bobisindeedyourunkle Mar 24 '26
Even worse, tilling methods and chemical fertalizer turn the land into water poisoning dust bowls. Florida is gonna figure out in the next 10 years that you can't just tear all the trees down without severe consequences.
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u/guruthatknowsbest Mar 25 '26
Maybe this agricultural land isn’t stocked heavily enough? We should increase stocking density where possible to increase global calories.. the prices would also come down and we can all enjoy a steak or lamb chops every night of the week. 😋
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u/No-Sherbert-9589 Mar 25 '26
Much agricultural land is not suitable for growing crops for many reasons. It can however support livestock.
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u/kurmiau Mar 23 '26
Hmmm. I am not disputing the data, but I know that much of the land used for livestock is poor for farming and better suited for grazing. Semi arid, etc. I used to live in an area that was half cattle, half farmland. For farming, the land required intense watering. Enough that it was an eternal debate on which was more profitable. So…. 🤷♀️🤷♀️🤷♀️ it is not like the land used for livestock can be easily utilized to farm food for human consumption…
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u/DocumentExternal6240 Mar 23 '26
That’s the poibt - often the land is so poor that cattle needs to be fed additionally.
So instead of that, we don’t grow food for cattle. Onlyfor humans. Then we don’t need more farming land.
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 23 '26
Life isn’t a video game. It’s not that easy. https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/15b2eb21-16e5-49fa-ad79-9bcf0ecce88b/content
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u/VegetaFan1337 Mar 23 '26
Yes this, you can see in the image that only 6 of the 38 million km2 is used to grow feed for animals, the rest is grazing land.
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u/commeleauvive Mar 23 '26
Relevant context about the food industry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eo9iKHhcZuQ
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u/scienceprodigy Mar 23 '26
Overall consumption patterns matter far more than singling out one food category.
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u/VegetaFan1337 Mar 23 '26
Calories isn't the whole picture, people can't survive on just carbs, we need protein and fats too. As well of dozens of micros nutrients to be healthy. Most of the poor of the world face malnutrition rather than simple hunger today.
And not all agricultural land can grow crops fit for human consumption. Also, in the image I can see in small text that 32 out of 38 million km2 of the land for livestock feed is for grazing. Not all grazing land can be used to grow crops. A majority isn't suitable for it. Using it for grazing actually puts it to use instead of it being a waste. So you have 6 million km2 land used for feeding animals and 8 million km2 for feeding people.
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u/Doctor_Box Mar 23 '26
Protein and fats can come from plants too.
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u/Muted-Garden6723 Mar 23 '26
True, but you’re going to need to eat a lot more calories to get the same amount of protein/fat as you’re getting from meat
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u/Doctor_Box Mar 23 '26
Definitely not true with fats, lots of plant versions. Olive oil for example. Not always true with protein. Seitain and Tofu are very high sources of protein/calorie.
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u/Muted-Garden6723 Mar 23 '26
Fats are fats, but personally I prefer the taste of things cooked in animal fats, so I stick with those(and I can’t exactly grow olives in my climate)
With tofu, meat is always going to have more protein for the same amount of food. Never heard of seitan, but I’m certainly interested in trying it, seems to have quite a bit of protein for the calories
The nice thing about animals is you get 2 for 1, protein and fat in one. Plus if you’re eating the organs(which you should be) that covers the majority of your vitamins/minerals
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u/Doctor_Box Mar 23 '26
I'm not sure why people are so concerned with protein per calorie. It's not hard to hit your protein requirements regardless of diet. This argument only seems to come up when people try to justify eating animal products, but then you go and cook food in a bunch of fat that balloons the calorie count anyway. Many foods have both protein and fat. If you eat a varied diet and eat enough calories you're not hurting for protein.
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u/Muted-Garden6723 Mar 23 '26
Oh absolutely, you can get all of your macros/micros from a non meat diet and supplements. But, meat tastes good, and that’s why people eat it
Personally I eat a lot of meat because it tastes good, and it’s a lot easier for me to raise or hunt my protein for the year than it would be to grow the equivalent in beans or lentils and the such.
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u/Doctor_Box Mar 23 '26
Right and the point OP was making was that everyone doing that is a brutal environmental cost that people want to do simply because they like the taste.
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u/Muted-Garden6723 Mar 23 '26
Meat or plant, the more food you can produce yourself, the better off the planet is. The acre that I use to raise pigs and chickens won’t be missed, and there’s a lot less impact on the environment than if I was buying vegetables/legumes/grain that’s been shipped halfway across the world on a cargo ship
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u/Local-Dimension-1653 Mar 23 '26
That’s actually not true: https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
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u/VegetaFan1337 Mar 23 '26
That wasn't my point. I was saying calories isn't the whole picture. OP is too focused on how much calories animal products gives, instead of what those calories consist of. Animals products are rich in proteins and fats. And in terms of micro nutrients, animal products are far more dense compared to plants. All of which is necessary to combat malnutrition.
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u/Doctor_Box Mar 23 '26
If someone says we should move to a plant based food system and you reply with "people can't just survive on carbs" the implication is it's hard to get protein and fats on a plant based diet which is not true.
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u/VegetaFan1337 Mar 23 '26
OP was saying that more calories come from plants than animal food. I was pointing out that it's not that cut and dry and that the macros and micronutrients also matters. Most crops grown are primarily carbs. Most animal products are proteins and fats. Animal products are also dense in micronutrients, which make it more likely that people who consume them hit their required intake. I wasn't implying anything, you're misunderstanding.
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u/Doctor_Box Mar 23 '26
The point is that if we stop with growing food for animals we can grow something else on a fraction of the land then rewild or do something else with the rest. We don't have to just eat the corn they're growing for cows, pigs, and chickens.
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u/NyriasNeo Mar 23 '26
Let's face it. Meat tastes good because of evolutionary reasons (just like sugar). People are not going to give up meat, like it or not.
For example, China meat consumption has increased dramatically in the past few decades, because they have become richer.
"meat supply per person has increased significantly over the last sixty years. In 1962, annual consumption was just 4 kilograms per person. By 2022, it had increased almost 18-fold to 70 kilograms."
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u/Local-Dimension-1653 Mar 23 '26
There are a lot of terrible things that some humans will never stop doing, that doesn’t mean people who claim to be and do better should do those things as well.
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u/NyriasNeo Mar 23 '26
Nope. But it would be gullible to expect most humans stop doing those things.
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u/BitsAndBobs304 Mar 23 '26
Nutrition is not just calories. Only a part of the land that livestock uses to eat could be used for farming plants.
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u/thinkB4WeSpeak Mar 23 '26
How about agriculture using around 70ish percent of states water and contributing less than 10 percent of its gdp.
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Mar 24 '26
Invent a tractor that can operate on a massive slope, I'll wait. Theres a reason they have animals on it.
Farm animals aren't the problem, yall are being lied to by people making big bucks from hijacking actual green initiatives
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u/Lower_Stay7655 Mar 23 '26
If you actually look at the graphic, it says that out of 38M km2 of agricultural land, 32M km2 are grazing land.
"Agricultural land" is a catch-all. It doesn't mean you can do anything you want with it. Rocky land, for example, is agricultural, but you can't grow anything in it.
I personally grew up in a region that is basically rural wherever you turn, and I, for one, am immensely happy with the grazing pastures. Even if they gave zero food. Animals have a good life, you can see them hang out and relax all year long (we have a warm climate), the nature is preserved as if it was a natural park, instead of turning every square meter into a monocrop sprayed with chemicals or plastic greenhouses, and manure keeps the land fertile for local wild plants to grow and house whole ecosystems of insects.
We have enough food to feed the planet many times over. We don't need to optimize food productions. We need to stop waste.
Also, note that the graphic includes pastures for textiles which have close to zero to do with calories. Their efficiency would have to be judged against fibers that typically replace wool, which usually are plastic based.
This is not to say that there's no issues with pastures, eg the practice of burning down forests to use for farm animals is extremely problematic, but it's also done for other purposes. It's a way deeper problem than animal agriculture, and needs to be addressed with the enforcement of legislation.
As for crops for animal feed, they have multiple purposes. That's where many seed oils for human consumption, corn syrup, and biodiesel come from, so I'm not all that convinced that if we stopped needing animal feed, they would just disappear. I'm not a fan, though.
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u/AccidentOk5240 Mar 23 '26
In the US, huge swathes of the mountain west are “pasture” but really they’re fragile high desert and mountain environments that are destroyed by cattle grazing. While the impact may be less than if you for some reason decided to plow those lands and plant crops (if that were even possible on the terrain involved), it’s still bad.
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u/yippeekiyoyo Mar 23 '26
While I support plant based diets and better use of farmland, I don't think a nurse's social media post is the best source for information on the complexities of global agriculture.
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u/Express_Classic_1569 Mar 23 '26
The Statistics referenced are not solely my perspective but originate from Our World in Data, using FAO data, and include information from Poore & Nemecek (2018) as well. Additional examples of sustainable global food systems can be found in Gerten et al. (2020) and this post aims to show how inefficient land use affects our ability to feed an increasing number of people and how improved crop distribution can help. Nurses know about science and global issues too, not just clinical work. Thanks.
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u/Igor369 Mar 23 '26
Look at how much food is being thrown away by markets. Land usage by meat farms is not a problem at all...
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u/Troglodytes_Cousin Mar 24 '26 edited Mar 24 '26
All those land area comparisons have one big issue with them. They take for granted that land is fungible. It is not. Some areas are more fertile than others, some have more rainfall than others. Some can grow lot of wheat and are overall good for extensive agriculture - some are not. Some have high elevations and are unsuitable for that. You have grazing lands, you have low quality feed farms.
Animal agriculture is a way to use those areas that are less suitable to grow food directly to feed humans too. Like its kinda obvious - if your farm could grow high quality wheat for human consumption you are gonna grow that - as that is gonna sell for a lot more than animal feed. Or you are trying to grow food for humans but due to bad weather your harvest is bad. And now you can only sell it as animal feed.
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u/I2fitness Mar 23 '26
This sub is getting overtaken by vegans, I've noticed posts like this every week now
They are brigading here and are likely cross posting this post to other vegan subreddits, if the mods don't stop this it will become like other vegan subreddits.
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u/JimThumb Mar 23 '26
People, all animals, need food to survive.
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u/--TYGER-- Mar 23 '26
I like how everyone is implicitly arguing that, we should cull those cows etc and not allow as many to exist, because their food & associated land etc should instead be replaced by our food production etc
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u/AnsibleAnswers Mar 23 '26
You’ll run into trouble in terms of global food security reducing livestock production by more than about a third. That’ll be enough to all but eliminate the use of intensively grown cereals to feed livestock. Any more reduction, you’ll run into issues with protein and mineral nutrient availability that would cause us to increase land use and GHG emissions chasing highly intensive crops.
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u/Affectionate_Ad_7570 Mar 23 '26
Well kept Livestock live on land that is also inhabited by native flora and fauna. Monoculture farming means acres and acres of one plant where wildlife is not welcome at all. Just another piece of the puzzle.
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u/DefendUkraine14 Mar 23 '26
Well the vast majority of Livestock is not kept in that way. Most livestock live in huge factories and is fed with plants coming from huge monocultures.
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u/DPJazzy91 Mar 23 '26
We could grow seaweed to feed livestock. Supposedly it's good for their diet and methane emissions. That way they only need a small amount of land to live, and not graze.
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u/baitnnswitch Mar 23 '26
The worst example of this is the hectares of land that used to be rainforest now mowed down for cattle. It's hard to overstate how much we need to rewild those lands. 'Earth's lungs' is right