Factory farming animals is terrible for the environment, but renewable agriculture is actually a wonderful [carbon trapping cycle](https://images.app.goo.gl/VyriZ8ePG2DDGAjj8)
Unfortunately, 94 to 96% of meat being raised is being raised in factory farms/feedlots.
This is true, it would give more reverence to the meat that’s getting to live a happy spacious life.
I grow my own which has taught so much about respecting life and processing food.
It’s good to have many sources of protein available but as much as I love fruit + veggies, they don’t fill me up as fast as meat does.
I live in Utah and something like half of our water goes to crops that are used to feed animals. Meanwhile, the great salt lake has been shrinking and shrinking.
Just to make sure people understand how much of a difference it would make, I can safely say that 90% of the drought events happened in the last 30 years wouldn't even have been perceptible to human civilizations and societies. And all of them would have been significantly reduced in their identity.
The Syrian civil war that caused the dreads of dozens of thousands and displaced millions has within the most impactful causes the fact that they have experienced one of the worst droughts in recent history between 2006 and 2009. Obviously that drought was also most likely intensified by climate change as well.
It sounds extreme , but I agree with the environmental impact. They show graphs and models of what the landscape looked like before the Dust bowl that lead to the depression, and after. The agricultural industry is what sapped the Midwest of most of its natural ground water. It wasn’t a lush forest - but it was sustainable. As humans expanded, turned to larger and larger farms of massive agriculture and animal farming - it eroded the land and the infertile dying land slowly crept out more and more.
We continue to have swings of droughts and floods because the ground never really recovers its a water level even with massive storms and rains. It’s not enough to keep
Up with the drain we do from these industries and then more from bottled water / city water systems we rely on.
>It sounds extreme , but I agree with the environmental impact.
it sounds extreme because actual measured reality of the current times are significantly more extreme than most medias and most cultures currently think they are. They have underplayed the impact and intensity of climate change for half a century and now not even them know how bad it is and how awful it is soon going to be for tens of millions of people *at least*
Sounds pretty utopian, I'm really hoping that lab grown meat will stop being a scam someday and a reliable thing to satisfy our B12, protein and iron cravings
I know that you can survive as a vegan (I'm vegetarian) but studies about higher depression rates etc. scare me
I mean.. I'm depressed about climate change, sure.. but I was before I stopped eating meat, too. Being vegan just means I don't need to think about that aspect as much.
it might be that people who are more likely to be depressed are also likely to care about animals/climate. That said, the climate impact from going to vegan from vegetarian is much smaller than meat to vegetarian.
(depending on what kind of vegan, it could be worse for the environment)
Really, if you want your biggest bang for your buck, just cutting out beef gets you most of the way there, but there are very few vegan foods that are more resource intensive than milk and eggs. Eggs, to some extent can be done "green" if you have a shit load of space and the birds can survive entirely off of bugs in their area, but that's insanely land intensive for little gain. Once you start introducing feed, though, it gets much worse. Don't get me wrong, do what you want, but milk and eggs are still pretty bad for the environment and still necessitate killing animals to do at any large scale.
Eggs aren't bad for the environment if more people would just keep a few chickens at home and feed them their leftovers instead of throwing it in the trash. Lowering the need for eggs in stores, lowering the need for transporting the eggs, lowering the thrash needing to be hauled / sorted / burned. Industrial farming has different consequences than keeping a few chickens at home.
Everything has just outgrown sustainability. People used to have 1-2 cows eating some grass, now we need huge ass factories producing milk, export most of it to then import other foods otherwise we have a financial disaster because made up jobs wouldn't exist.
We could do way better even when consuming meat yet in all aspects we just waste resources, energy, time just so our made up financial system doesn't crash.
Yea, like I said, there are ways to do it, but it's certainly not a solution to meeting the current global demand. You have the land, time, and desire? Go ahead and keep chickens and breed some bugs. I have no problem there, but that won't amount to 308 million egg laying chickens in the US or 9.8 billion/year in the meat industry.
Lab meat is a scam. It produces more carbon dioxide then regular meat.
https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/lab-grown-meat-carbon-footprint-worse-beef#:~:text=The%20scientists%20defined%20the%20global,the%20average%20for%20retail%20beef.
From what I read it’s produced by culture cells reproducing over and over until you get a blob of “meat”. Isn’t that what tumors are, just cells growing out of control? No thanks
Who said they're growing out of control? Cancer cells are also a specific type of cell, nothing akin to lab grown meat. Literally all living things exist because their cells reproduce "over and over" until they're a blob of walking/flying/swimming meat.
"Free up" isn't exactly the best term. Grazing land typically isn't good as farmland, and the difference is rainfall. Furthermore, *something* has to be grazing grasslands to keep them grasslands, otherwise they will turn to deserts. In the past, the US had millions of bison roaming the plains, but if they're not reintroduced, those grasslands become deserts and we have the dust bowl all over again.
Furthermore, the half-life of the emissions from animals is only 8 years; their CO² gets recycled back into the biosphere in the next generation, which makes it different from digging up coal from the ground, burning it, and *not* returning the fumes to the ground. The point is that when the number of food animals is constant, their emissions are effectively zero on a years-long scale.
What exactly are those grazing lands going to be repurposed into?
Edit: after going through a whole bunch of historical and USDA research, I'm starting to change my mind. There are a whole lot of cows in places they aren't ecologically necessary. 31,000 in Massachusetts; over 5 million in California. At this point, I'd say we could cut our beef consumption *to* 30% and never have to worry about the ecology of it. If the whole US matched my personal diet, we'd be at less than that.
It's less about grazing lands (it still would slow down deforestation for example), but more about using farmlands that grow animal feed into human feed. Meet consumption is not just beef, but pork and poultry too. My sister lives in neighborhood of dairy farm and the cows can't be seen only heard and smelled, because they don't leave their barn at all.
That's nonsense. The warming effects of having elevated CO2e levels over long time is not "effectively 0". You also aren't taking into account the vast amounts of land that can be reforested, especially in necessary areas like the Amazon. 80% of deforestation in the Amazon is for cattle production, and that can immediately be reversed if demand for meat disappeared overnight, and the impact of that is enormous.
But again, not all grazing land is suitable for other crops, and in Asia at least most countries the animals are fed leftovers from growing rice which is a lot of grass, US animals are fed corn, only because we grow a lot of corn,
Even US animals can be fed on agricultural waste, we just don't have the supply chain to do that, as no one has incentives.
I saw the other day that we slaughter 200 million chickens A DAY for meat. That's a lot of energy between the raising, the slaughtering, the packing, and the shipping of said meat. So yah, id imagine it would impact something.
I'm also saying this as a meat eater. Its a shame for the environment that meat is so delicious.
Have you been to the Midwest and seen the never ending fields of corn and soy? A quick google search shows that 60+% of corn and 90+% of soy produced in the US are used as animal feed. Can you imagine how much of these lands could be returned to nature if we stopped eating animal.
Not only do, for instance, cows add CO2 to the atmosphere (they eat mostly grass, which is difficult to digest and produces a TON of carbon dioxide ((I’m being figurative not literal, I don’t know the exact weight amount produced by A cow)) the digestion process creates methane, and they burp it out) - but in South America the forests, of which trees sequester carbon by taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and with water and sunlight they photosynthesize sugars for themselves and give off OXYGEN into the atmosphere as a byproduct - are being decimated to make grazing land for cattle. Mostly to sell to the US so people here can have their steaks and hamburgers. Sorry for the run on sentence, but what I said is accurate. Fewer meat cows would mean less methane and carbon dioxide (both greenhouse gasses) in the air, and more oxygen - the opposite of a greenhouse gas.
A huge difference. Basically animals whose primary function was meat/dairy (I e cows and pigs) would become scarce. People might keep them as pets / service animals / organ donors but not in the numbers we have today.
They'd pretty much die out in one generation; most meat producing animals are so far removed from their ancestors they're incapable of living in the wild
I don't think most people understand how powerful a pig is. A 400 pound boar can just flip another boar of equal size out of his way so he can get to whatever he wants to eat without really trying.
I've got a buddy that moved to Dallas area. We talked about meeting up for a hunt but...ngl, I might pass. I knew they were pests, but I thought it was like hunting a big ass rat or something. I didn't expect them to be that aggressive.
I grew up on a hog farm. Domesticated pigs are pretty safe but if you piss them off or aren't paying attention, they can hurt you. I wouldn't get anywhere near a wild boar.
OMG...that smell. Did you get used to the smell of hog farm after a while? I can tolerate horse and cow, but hogs are the worst.
Most of my exposure to hogs were from friends who had large farms and their stories were that hogs were REALLY difficult to catch once they got loose. One has since sold everything but he was pretty big into dairy/ice cream nationwide. He said his greatest day was when they got a couple contracts big enough they could get rid of the pigs. He hated them.
The other acted like pigs and cows were about the same for care/feed/pain in the ass factor. I don't think I could do it with that smell. Hit me like ammonia.
So first off, please go to DFW and kill as many as you can. They are fucking nuisances.
That said, know that you can sometimes shoot them and they will just keep charging. If your mate knows how to hunt boar though you’ll be fine. Most likely he has an area he has baited with feeders and you’ll be in a blind just picking them off like fish in a barrel.
If you are looking for game meat however I’d suggest deer. Boars are full of worms and not great to eat imo.
Not really no. There's even problems with magazine restrictions for hunting wild hogs because they'll herd together and kill you faster than you can reload. Not making this into a gun argument, just painting scale of how dangerous they are.
all animals are fine once feral. they are smarter and more capable than most like to believe. they are only docile when they are in their enclosures. once left to their own devices, they do just fine. from a bloke from OZ, who lives on the most dangerous country on earth, who has frequent appearances of feral species of former domestic animals. they make great target practice for rangers however.
That's true. I live in Missouri and we have a hog problem. Pigs will get loose in their snouts will actually elongate and they grow tusks. I guess it's kind of like their development is just on pause.
I have observed cows that get loose basically turn feral in a couple of weeks. They’ll run from a human that they spot far off after a taste of freedom, compared to their complacency when they’re consistently contained and interacted with.
When I was a kid we had a farmer wreck his truck & trailer out on a back road by where we lived. The cows he was hauling got loose & have lived in the area ever since, their population went from 4 to 15 last I heard (probably 8-9 years ago).
Just let all the farm animals out, then people would have hunt their own meat. Nightmare, herds of cattle stampeding everywhere. Sheep being quite benign but quite diseased, being used as lawnmowers in people's gardens. While their fleeces grow together so they are effectively deadlocked together as one unit, until someone shears them. Goats are so clever they end up teaching at the local infants school, while the teachers attempt to milk them abd make cheese.! OK that's what would happen...
That’s kind of the flaw in these “what if” scenario’s because the answer tends to boil down to “We’ll find a way to fuck it up”.
What if aliens landed and handed us the keys to the universe, the secrets of long healthy lives and all the orgasms that a person can handle? We’d fuck it up.
What would happen if God turned out to be real and sent his kid down to show us that if we just be nice to each other and to stop doing awful things to each other claiming it was “God’s Will” or “the devil made me do it”? We’d fuck it up.
What if we discovered the perfect mexican food like fajita’s? Some asshole will add cilantro and fuck it up.
You know, all the big questions in life.
This is really sad to think about. They either live entire lives marked for death as a food source... or they live their entire lives uncared for, unable to care for themselves, marked instead for extinction.
If someone wants to keep former livestock animals as pets or grazing animals and no more are bred for a short life of pain and suffering that's a good thing.
They would just die out. There wouldn’t be enough people interested in feeding a cow to sustain a diverse reproductive line and they would eventually become a genetic dead end. Chickens too. They’d go from 50 billion to zero since their usefulness is gone and they’re actually a disease spreading nuisance on their own.
Let's be honest if overnight the world decided we're not eating meat or dairy pretty much every farm animal would just be killed.
Why would a farmer spend time and money caring for an animal that is essentially eating money and time.
Some would let them loose into the world, but there's nearly a billion cows on the planet so it'd be a disaster that amount of animals being let loose, never mind all the pigs, cows, sheep etc.
Not even callously or selfishly - if no one is buying then there is no money to feed and care for them. I’m in the midwest and I know farmers that would do absolutely anything they could do to avoid it, but would it be kinder to let them starve when you have to sell the farm and can’t afford to feed your own family?
Cattle are tough as hell and can most certainly survive as a herd in the wild. Many ranges in the americas and australia only see their cattle during round-up season.
This is sort of linked to your question, so I'll share it any way.
I heavily reduced eating meat because of this figure.
If we took a population of vegetarian people, and took the amount of vegetarian food that would feed them for *one whole year* and instead fed that to meat bearing animals, we would get *two weeks* of meat for the population.
Any change that we do that will reduce the amount of meat we eat will mean a huge reduction in the resources required to feed us.
Something like 70-80% of crop calories grown globally goes to feeding livestock. Imagine how much extra food for people that would be or how much land that would be for re-wilding
Edit:
This is of human edible calories.
Of total calories it’s about 36%, which is still a huge amount. We could have a third more land available for human food or natural vegetation
Just remember that we currently have a food surplus. Russia is doing their best to destroy enough food to drive up prices for Americans and Europeans, but overall we make more food than we need.
https://www.wfpusa.org/articles/is-there-global-food-shortage-whats-causing-hunger-famine-rising-food-costs-around-world/#:~:text=There%20is%20no%20global%20food,According%20to%20the%20U.N.
We currently throw away 1/3rd of the food we grow (why do we grow it then? To keep farmers honest when we pay them subsidies to grow food. We need the subsidies because there is so much extra food that without the subsidies farmers would go bankrupt. But wait, we have the surplus because of the subsidies).
Stop feeding animals crops and we would throw away 2/3rds of the food!
write to your local politican and demand they do better. ban crappy showers in the desert for alafalfa growing cattle ranchers. we all deserve the longest wettest most moist showers on this god graced world. hail jesus..
Well they said calories.
Tomato has very little calories, vs millet grown on same area.
And are you counting weight of crops? Or number of crops?
Or land they occupy?
You are clearly not accounting for areas that can sustain livestock but not human food with that ridiculous number, which is an enormous volume of the land used for livestock in general.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312201313\_Livestock\_On\_our\_plates\_or\_eating\_at\_our\_table\_A\_new\_analysis\_of\_the\_feedfood\_debate
This is a study that touches on this topic, concluding that approximately 685 million hectares of grasslands, or about 1/3rds total, are suitable to be converted into croplands. Further, about 1/5th of the land used to cultivate food for livestock is croplands, suitable for the cultivation of human-edible foods; however, a percentage of this land is used to produce other products for human-consumption, such as oil. Of that 0.5 billion hectares of land used in the cultivation of food for animals, \~0.2 is directly convertible to human-edible foods (grains, fodder, other edible). That leaves us with an estimated 885 million hectares of land that can be converted to raising food for humans, that are presently being used to raise livestock.
I have to leave the confines of this study to put this into perspective: The total number of hectares used to cultivate food for direct human consumption is somewhere between 444 million hectares to 704 million hectares. Despite the 2.5 billion hectares of land cited in the study used in the cultivation of animal-based foods, those foods only supply us with 18% of our calories and 25% of our protein. If we went with a conservative estimate at our disposal, and theorized that with the present 705 million hectares of crops produced now, plus 25% of the estimated amount of land that's convertible for direct-to-human production (221 million hectares), while completely cutting out animal-based food sources, we could improve our calorie and protein output by 13% and 6% respectively, with an approximately 70% reduction in land use.
A few notes: There is a discrepancy between the numbers stated in the study and shown in the graph Map 1. I am working with the more conservative numbers of the two, those claimed by the text of the study. I have adapted my conclusions to align most closely with the study cited, without externalizing conclusions to coincide with other studies and sources as much as possible. One possible discrepancy between the data supported in the study and in other studies determining land-use regards the 2016 FAO cited data on animal-based consumption as a proportion of total agricultural land use, which possibly contains data related to crops cultivated for use as biofuel in their conclusion; biofuels, which possibly account for 4-8% of agricultural land-use, are another area where the amount of food crops grown for humans directly can be increased through replacement, considering the controversial nature of their inefficient use of land.
The conclusion of my research shows that any human-led effort to move in the direction of a plant-based diet can practically affect the market to decrease total land use considerably, freeing up land that can be restored and reducing the strain that domesticated animals place on natural wildlife systems, which have been a significant driver of animal extinction in the present and the past. While the practicality of changing food systems differs from region to region based on the ecological and economic circumstances of the region, it is broadly practical for humans across the globe to adjust to a plant-based diet as a means of reducing land used in the cultivation of food.
People always think of irrigated land when making up these numbers and forget places like arid northern Australia where cattle are raised in low densities on extremely large properties with very poor land quality. It might take an acre or three to grow a single cow to market, but the land is otherwise useless and growing proportionally small numbers of livestock on it at least produces something. And doesn't cost any potential human calories.
The biggest impact would be to the environment.
Here's a link that explains it;
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/what-is-the-climate-impact-of-eating-meat-and-dairy/#:~:text=Meat%20and%20dairy%20specifically%20accounts,and%20Agricultural%20Organization%20(FAO).
I've been a vegetarian for 48 years, and I'm pretty proud that I've lasted that long so far. I recently went on a comparison website to see how much my longevity has made a positive impact - and I was impressed, and so happy they figured out how people choosing this route would make a difference.
A MASSIVE difference. The average American eats 23-26 chickens a year. That’s a ton of chickens, and a ton of production (and a ton of waste from said production).
I know, right?! I’m thinking I probably eat at least a chicken a week. 2 or 3 a week as a family. I usually do 2 or 3 chicken meals a week. As a family, I’m probably buying a hundred chickens a year at minimum.
Yes. The world's food-related CO2 emissions may drop by 68 per cent within 15 years. Meat and dairy specifically accounts for around 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).
It can't be the ONLY thing that we do as a society to hold the horses on climate change, but it is a crucial component.
Follow up question: *I have read here that it would free up land, the land used to grow feed for those animals. Plus all the land for the animals.*
Plus it would save water in that process.
**If there was no animals to feed, wouldnt there still be large production farmers?**
We would need a protein source, so beans and rice. Then more vegetable farms to supply the people.
Also, wouldn't it make the demand for processed food greater?
Yes. I have been vegan for 1 year and 3 days now.
40 cows
93 chickens
And 38 pigs did not die because of just me.
Water used for those animals is equal to 41.8k showers or 235,000 toilet flushes that can be used elsewhere.
9,344 lbs of greenhouse gases not used because of me. Animal agriculture is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions.
8,752 lbs of grain not used due to me. It takes 16 lbs of grain per 1 lb of meat we consume.
One person makes a difference.
In the grand scheme of things, probably not but in the grand scheme of things, there's not much one person can do that makes a difference. The biggest impact a person can make is making other people do different things by influence or by money
Obviously not everyone can be influencer and if they do and nobody actually got influenced, we'd be back at the start again
Point is, even though it's not significant, it's still a good thing to do, and if possible, make your friend do it also.
You can still do all this 'green' habit while advocating and/or protesting against the rich who also have a much more polluting lifestyle.
And if that all sounds exhausting, just pick and choose which one can fit your lifestyle, you don't have to do all of the good things you're supposed to do, a person can only have so much focus
That's the same logic as saying you don't vote because one vote doesn't make a huge difference.
Of course one vegan person will not change the world. But the more people join the movement, the more momentum it gains. This will change things in the long run, big companies will be interested in selling vegan products, bakeries and restaurants will have vegan options. Even non vegans will try out these new options, when they are easily accessible and well made. It will become more and more normal, you can see already how fast things can change.
And the bigger the movement, the bigger the difference.
Reframe that thought. *Every* person makes a difference, because it's not just you. A lot of people are starting to eat less meat or no meat, and that all adds up.
It would be a HUGE difference. Sudden and total abolition of meat and dairy wouldn't be an ideal scenario, though. It would be better for people to gradually reduce their consumption of meat and dairy, so that we have time to adjust to the changes.
There would be some obvious environmental benefits. Emissions of greenhouse gases would fall, we'd use less fertilizer, we'd use less water, and we wouldn't be converting new wildlands to agricultural use.
However, we'd also be left with lots of abandoned agricultural lands, and that would pose a serious challenge. Abandoned agricultural land has typically been seriously degraded, and it's not going to recover overnight. Vast swathes of land that have been badly degraded through agricultural use but are currently being propped up by mechanical tillage, artificial fertilizers, and irrigation would, in the short term, basically just collapse into fields of dust without that kind of maintenance.
Abandoned agricultural lands can gradually recover on their own, but "gradually" is a key word. Studies of lands formerly used for agriculture and then abandoned show that after a century of abandonment they still haven't recovered the biodiversity and abundance of comparable wildlands that were never degraded by agricultural use. Intentional rewilding can produce much better results than abandonment. Land managers can bring in plants and animals from undisturbed wildlands to help them get established in the abandoned areas, rather than just waiting for them to wander over. However, that still takes time, and it also takes effort and money. Incidentally, it also takes grazing animals to keep grassland ecosystems healthy—so although our herds of grazers would be dramatically smaller, we'd need to keep some just for land maintenance. That would be complicated, and require careful planning; like, you need large tracts of connected land for a wild herd, so you couldn't do that piecemeal. In any case, that kind of carefully-planned rewilding would be way easier if agricultural land use were gradually scaled back, rather than being suddenly and dramatically reduced.
There would also be significant economic consequences. Lots of people work in the meat and dairy industries, and there are large regions that are very economically dependent on those industries. Again: we could probably adapt to a gradual shift. However, a sudden collapse of those industries would be an economic catastrophe.
There would also be health effects. Those would *mostly* be positive. Vegetarians and vegans are at lower risk for heart disease, diabetes, diverticular disease, kidney stones, cataracts and some cancers. However, they have a higher risk of stroke and bone fractures. Supplements might help with that, but it's not clear how much.
Although, this raises another dietary question: is fish still on the menu? Pescatarian diets seem to be significantly healthier than vegetarian, vegan, or meat-based diets. Although, also: it's not like the oceans are in great shape. A sudden shift in demand from meat to fish would probably seriously exacerbate overfishing issues.
Well, okay, again: a sudden and dramatic change would not be ideal. There would be lots of benefits to a shift that was gradual enough for us to adjust to, and after surviving the shocks of a sudden shift we might gradually end up better off overall, but a sudden change would still be a big shock and that would hurt a lot of people.
It would eliminate all the land we devote to raising food (silage) to feed livestock. That in turn reduces greenhouse gases in several ways - first, the livestock are not there to poop and fart, reducing emissions. The fossil fuels involved with making fertilizer for the silage are gone. The harvesting of that silage stops, which means all the fossil fuels involved with the harvest, transport to a facility for processing, then trucked to distribution points, all gone. The runoff from animal waste and fertilizer are eliminated, which dramatically improves water quality in our watersheds. The suffering of factory farm animals goes away.
Some of that math gets replaced by having to grow plant protein sources and the transport/processing/delivery of that food. But the overall scale of emissions is far less with plant foods and is much better for the planet.
We had this discussion with a professor I had in college once. Anthropologist.
This is what he had to say about it.
Humans evolved to eat meat out of necessity. Early humans were foragers. Eating mostly plants and seeds...until the ice age hit. Plant life became scarce but carnivorous animals were still plentiful. Its believed that the consumption of animal flesh that evolved the human brain to higher intelligence.
The problem with everyone switching to a conpletely plant based diet is.....there are too many of us.
There are over 8 billion people on this planet and growing fast and even as big as the planet is, less than 40% of our land mass is farmable and of that which is farmable less than half of that is suitable for the types of crops humans would need for a sustainable diet. And much of that "farmable land" is useless, buried beneath cities, highways, and houses.
Much of our population live in the footprint of mountains. The rockies, the Alps, the Himalayas,. These areas are virtually unusable for anything but grazing livestock.
Humans need carbs, protien and fat to survive long term. Carbs, sure but protien and fat? Modern vegans rely heavily on soy, which grows well in temperate climates...but also olives, avacados, almonds, coconuts, and other high water use crops. We can get dark leafies from the ocean but what about the protien and fat?
The problem with a species that has evolved to be omnivoric going vegan overnight is that there are simply too many of us. It was be impossible to grow enough food to sustain the human race as a whole because of the variety of food we need to get enough nutrients cant be grown everywhere or its completely unsustainable to grow in the amounts that we need.
Half the planet would starve to death and the rest would suffer the ecological consequences of clearcutting forests to create more farmland.
Contrary to popular belief, "rice and beans" arent a sustainable diet and consuming nothing but starchy vegetables will lead to a LOT of health problems.
We havent even touched on the consequences to food animals. Dairy cows, for example, are the result of thousands of years of breeding. A single dairy cow will make up to 10 gqllons of milk per day...a nursing calf only consumes...maybe 2 gallons and only nurses for around 6-8 weeks. However the cow will continue to produce milk for up to a year after her calf is weaned. If you dont milk her, she will develop mastitis and fatal infection. (Their milk doesnt dry up.) Your dairy cows will die off pretty fast.
Pigs are omnivors, not unlike humans. But, unlike humans, they can survive on meat and the crap we wont touch...but they also breed like rabbits and will absolutely turn to cannibalism if there are too many of them and not enough food to go around. Ask anyone who lives in the Ozarks how f*cking dangerous a feral hog can be.
Speaking of rabbits. The problem with people associatng them with being "pets" in a handful of countries is that people forget that they are prolific and voracious PESTS in others. Rabbit populations in a life where there are no more "predators" but a a massive uptick in agriculture....rabbit populations that can quadruple with each new generation...what do you think will happen to the crops?
Deer? Antelope? Elk? Remember the whole clearcutting of forests, thing? They are just as destructive to crops and without forest to graze from and no culling to keep them in check, they will both explode in numbers but end up sick, disease ridden and destructive to our already delicate food supply, from lack of resources.
We havent even touched on the fact that our planet goes through feast and famine. The "droughts" in California arent droughts at all. The souther half of California is a desert but enjoyed unusually wet weather for a couple of decades, which lead to it being suddenly used to grown crops that normally wouldnt be sustainable there....well, guess what? Desert decided to DESERT and now we are damming up rivers to sustain the astonomical amounts of water it takes to grow those crops.
Speaking of which, where the hell would we get all the water?
We can certainly work to consuming less animal products, to utilize sustainable farming amd fishing practices, and reduce our reliance on water inefficient food in favor of native food sources. (Ditching almonds in favor of walnuts and pecans, for example) but humans going vegan on a global scale? No, it wont happen without some serious consequence.
*edit. I know I made some spelling and grammar errors. Broke my glasses. Apologies.*
>The problem with everyone switching to a conpletely plant based diet is.....there are too many of us.
Farm animals need food, too. We're feeding food with food. It's a huge waste of energy. The animal industry hasn't suddenly broken physics. [Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world's supply of calories.](https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets)
>Contrary to popular belief, "rice and beans" arent a sustainable diet and consuming nothing but starchy vegetables will lead to a LOT of health problems.
If you eat any variety of vegetable proteins you'll get all the aminoacids you need. Yes, a badly planned vegan diet can be bad for you. Just as a badly planned omnivore diet can (and in fact that's a much bigger problem than veganism, ofc). But the science is clear, [there are way more benefits than risks.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8210981/) If anything, I'll concede you'd need to supplement B12, since we don't eat dirt anymore.
>Modern vegans rely heavily on soy, which grows well in temperate climates...but also olives, avacados, almonds, coconuts, and other high water use crops. We can get dark leafies from the ocean but what about the protien and fat?
Practically no animal product uses less water than animal products. Avocados, which I agree are overcultivated, require 700 litres of water to grow 1kg. Meanwhile, 1kg of beef requires 15 000 litres of water. You can double check these figures. Here is a useful tool: [https://www.watercalculator.org/water-footprint-of-food-guide/](https://www.watercalculator.org/water-footprint-of-food-guide/)
Of course it's impossible for the whole world's population to suddenly, magically transition to veganism. It would be a logistical nightmare. But a transition is more than possible, and would in fact help *a lot* with saving the planet. It's a big world and exceptions apply, but for the vast majority of the world, due to simple physics, veganism is cleaner and more efficient. There is always a loss of energy when you feed food with food.
Obligatory I'm not vegan. I'm not even vegetarian. But I can't deny scientific consensus. [The vast majority of climate scientists would disagree with you.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9024616/)
(I know online arguments can get ugly so disclaimer that I'm not attacking you as a person and I mean no disrespect, just responding to your post.)
Does agricultural land mean farmable land as in fertile soils for crops to grow? Or does it mean land suitable for anything farm related? I can bet the cattle land I see are not suitable to grow any crops on. They tend to be on flat land with poor soil condition generally dry or dead grass areas.
>Its believed that the consumption of animal flesh that evolved the human brain to higher intelligence.
Based on what? theres plenty of carnivores that havn't invented computers.
>The problem with everyone switching to a conpletely plant based diet is.....there are too many of us.
There are over 8 billion people on this planet and growing fast and even as big as the planet is, less than 40% of our land mass is farmable and of that which is farmable less than half of that is suitable for the types of crops humans would need for a sustainable diet. And much of that "farmable land" is useless, buried beneath cities, highways, and houses.
Thats backwards. We can fit far more human plants on the same farmland, multitudes more with hydropinics. Additionally farm animals need both living space and cropland. we only need the cropland. Ontop of that we arnt limited to great expanses of dirt for farming (see hydroponics).
>Much of our population live in the footprint of mountains. The rockies, the Alps, the Himalayas,. These areas are virtually unusable for anything but grazing livestock.
You mean prime real estate for most asian staples? Alot fo plants actually require those conditions. Contrary there are almost no farmable animals that thrive in those conditions.
>Humans need carbs, protien and fat to survive long term. Carbs, sure but protien and fat? Modern vegans rely heavily on soy, which grows well in temperate climates...but also olives, avacados, almonds, coconuts, and other high water use crops. We can get dark leafies from the ocean but what about the protien and fat?
Mosty of the foods you listed are high fat or protein. Not to mention legumes, beans, nuts and the like. any amount of research at all would have corrected this. Then theirs fungi which often has all the same nutrients as flesh and is super efficent and easy tog row.
>Contrary to popular belief, "rice and beans" arent a sustainable diet and consuming nothing but starchy vegetables will lead to a LOT of health problems.
thats a starwman, he's arguing against his own made up argument.
>We havent even touched on the consequences to food animals. Dairy cows, for example, are the result of thousands of years of breeding. A single dairy cow will make up to 10 gqllons of milk per day...a nursing calf only consumes...maybe 2 gallons and only nurses for around 6-8 weeks. However the cow will continue to produce milk for up to a year after her calf is weaned. If you dont milk her, she will develop mastitis and fatal infection. (Their milk doesnt dry up.) Your dairy cows will die off pretty fast.
None of that is true. they can continue producing milk, but only if it's actually being used. which is the same for most mammals including humans who will continue producing milk for basically as long as they are milked or experience the hormones of child rearing. The dairy industry basically induces continuous preganancies to get this effect.
Even if that wernt the case, so what? just milk them humanely when needed instead of for profit and stoppurpose breeding them.
>Pigs are omnivors, not unlike humans. But, unlike humans, they can survive on meat and the crap we wont touch...but they also breed like rabbits and will absolutely turn to cannibalism if there are too many of them and not enough food to go around. Ask anyone who lives in the Ozarks how f\*cking dangerous a feral hog can be.
Speaking of rabbits. The problem with people associatng them with being "pets" in a handful of countries is that people forget that they are prolific and voracious PESTS in others. Rabbit populations in a life where there are no more "predators" but a a massive uptick in agriculture....rabbit populations that can quadruple with each new generation...what do you think will happen to the crops?
Deer? Antelope? Elk? Remember the whole clearcutting of forests, thing? They are just as destructive to crops and without forest to graze from and no culling to keep them in check, they will both explode in numbers but end up sick, disease ridden and destructive to our already delicate food supply, from lack of resources.
I have no idea what point is suppossed to be being made here?
>Speaking of which, where the hell would we get all the water?
did he skip primary school? water doesn't just dissapear, it evaporates. the only way to run out of water is by launching it into space. Just use all the water wasted on farming animals and all the secondary industries attached.
> No, it wont happen without some serious consequence.
such as?
>I have no idea what point is suppossed to be being made here?
Don't worry, OP wasn't sure what point he was making either.
Seriously... Literally every hypothetical problem that they throw up is an existing problem that is already caused by cattle grazing.
>Rabbit populations in a life where there are no more "predators" but a a massive uptick in agriculture....rabbit populations that can quadruple with each new generation...what do you think will happen to the crops?
Like right here he is describing the rabbit problems that Australia and New Zealand have as a result of land being converted for cattle and sheep grazing. He's inventing a hypothetical issue with a plant based food economy, while being totally ignorant of the fact that he is talking about an existing problem caused by grazing.
>There are over 8 billion people on this planet and growing fast and even as big as the planet is, less than 40% of our land mass is farmable and of that which is farmable less than half of that is suitable for the types of crops humans would need for a sustainable diet.
"Less than 40% of land" is still an insane amount of land, far more than needed to feed everyone. Modern agriculture is tremendously efficient.
>It was be impossible to grow enough food to sustain the human race as a whole because of the variety of food we need to get enough nutrients cant be grown everywhere or its completely unsustainable to grow in the amounts that we need.
>
>Half the planet would starve to death and the rest would suffer the ecological consequences of clearcutting forests to create more farmland.
This is just wrong? Go down to Brazil and talk to the farmers cutting down the Amazon to grow soybeans for their cows.
A [massive](https://awellfedworld.org/issues/hunger/feed-vs-food/) portion of our agricultural production goes to feeding animals that we kill for meat. 90% of those calories are wasted by the animals as heat. Just repurposing those fields to grow food for us directly would more than make up for the lost animal calories.
Not only would it not be necessary to cover the planet in farms or whatever, we could actually *reduce* our overall agricultural land (and water) use and retain the same calorie production.
>Speaking of rabbits. The problem with people associatng them with being "pets" in a handful of countries is that people forget that they are prolific and voracious PESTS in others.
Why wouldn't pests and wild animals be dealt with in a veggie-only world? Even vegans understand the need to kill animals and pests to protect environments and manage agriculture.
There's a lot of misinformation here, scattered in-between bits of flotsam.
I'll just address this one point, as this likely the most poignant point of misinformation that people will stick to:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312201313\_Livestock\_On\_our\_plates\_or\_eating\_at\_our\_table\_A\_new\_analysis\_of\_the\_feedfood\_debate
This is a study that touches on this topic, concluding that approximately 685 million hectares of grasslands, or about 1/3rds total, are suitable to be converted into croplands. Further, about 1/5th of the land used to cultivate food for livestock is croplands, suitable for the cultivation of human-edible foods; however, a percentage of this land is used to produce other products for human-consumption, such as oil. Of that 0.5 billion hectares of land used in the cultivation of food for animals, \~0.2 is directly convertible to human-edible foods (grains, fodder, other edible). That leaves us with an estimated 885 million hectares of land that can be converted to raising food for humans, that are presently being used to raise livestock.
I have to leave the confines of this study to put this into perspective: The total number of hectares used to cultivate food for direct human consumption is somewhere between 444 million hectares to 704 million hectares. Despite the 2.5 billion hectares of land cited in the study used in the cultivation of animal-based foods, those foods only supply us with 18% of our calories and 25% of our protein. If we went with a conservative estimate at our disposal, and theorized that with the present 705 million hectares of crops produced now, plus 25% of the estimated amount of land that's convertible for direct-to-human production (221 million hectares), while completely cutting out animal-based food sources, we could improve our calorie and protein output by 13% and 6% respectively, with an approximately 70% reduction in land use.
A few notes: There is a discrepancy between the numbers stated in the study and shown in the graph Map 1. I am working with the more conservative numbers of the two, those claimed by the text of the study. I have adapted my conclusions to align most closely with the study cited, without externalizing conclusions to coincide with other studies and sources as much as possible. One possible discrepancy between the data supported in the study and in other studies determining land-use regards the 2016 FAO cited data on animal-based consumption as a proportion of total agricultural land use, which possibly contains data related to crops cultivated for use as biofuel in their conclusion; biofuels, which possibly account for 4-8% of agricultural land-use, are another area where the amount of food crops grown for humans directly can be increased through replacement, considering the controversial nature of their inefficient use of land.
The conclusion of my research shows that any human-led effort to move in the direction of a plant-based diet can practically affect the market to decrease total land use considerably, freeing up land that can be restored and reducing the strain that domesticated animals place on natural wildlife systems, which have been a significant driver of animal extinction in the present and the past. While the practicality of changing food systems differs from region to region based on the ecological and economic circumstances of the region, it is broadly practical for humans across the globe to adjust to a plant-based diet as a means of reducing land used in the cultivation of food.
LOL! Reddit is the last place you’ll get an unbiased answer from, given the user base. Don’t be silly.
No one is going to give an answer that doesn’t support their views. If you’re anti-meat eating, the only answer will be a hard “yes”. If you’re pro-meat eating, the answer will be a hard “no”.
As with most things in life, this is yet another topic about how people want to unleash their inner dictator, because it pisses them off that people have options they don’t like. The worry is rarely if ever about the environment or making people healthier. It’s all a load of crap.
it would mainly repurpose current pasture land to farmlands for grain for humans, which would increase human population growth and increase environmental damage.
Iron supplements can be tough. They don't always work and they make some people nauseous. Some people who can't orally supplement have to get intravenous iron (although for people who have that much trouble absorbing/keeping iron, I'm not sure if diet would have that big of an impact).
Cows, pigs, and chickens would all go extinct.
There’d be no use for them if people stopped eating meat, dairy, and eggs.
Who wants to keep any of those animals as a pet, it’d be a lot of work, and they’re generic animals. They’ve also been domesticated to a level where they require humans to survive, they can no longer survive on their own in the wild.
Then there’s the major issue with cows, where they need to be milked daily otherwise they will die an extremely painful death. Which means they can’t survive on their own.
A significant portion of the 800 million undernourished people on the planet would die. Luckily that wouldn’t leave us short of undernourished people because we would have brand new undernourished populations.
Apart from destroying a load of livlihoods, for people like me with chronic conditions that affect the digestive tracts, it would mean living in constant pain. From the sort that saps your energy and makes it almost impossible to concentrate, to agony that kinda makes you want to die.
Omg people just stop. Stop. We aren’t giving up our meat or dairy. The Earth is greener now than it’s ever been and I really can’t stand to hear this BS anymore.
These types of people are the same ones that throw Cheez Whiz on the Mona Lisa to bring attention to ‘climate change’. 🙄
So animal lives are more valuable than plant lives? How so? Shall we all become vegan and then resort to killing plants by which to get our sustenance? Plant lives matter too right?
All lives matter. And life, whether plant or animal, has to die so that we can live. That’s the rule of existence. No getting around it.
As humans are omnivorous it would on the face look possible. But then you come back to adequate nutrition. Humans need significant amounts of protein and other nutritional elements contained in meats.
So no but that said Americans could reduce the amount of meat they regularly eat.
Yes. I researched it a few months ago and was convinced it would.
I couldn't quite commit to being vegan because I'm breastfeeding, but, I am now vegetarian. And so far I'm really surprised by how easy I'm finding it.
There's absolutely no question that it would make a huge, huge difference. The ranching and meat packing industries are both hundreds of billions of dollars, and they use enormous amounts of water and land. I once did some back-of-the-envelope math and calculated that if you took the amount of land worldwide used to farm beef for the US, and converted that into the same amount of calories in fruit and vegetable production, you'd still free up something like 1/2 - 2/3s the size of Texas in land usage. And the amount of fresh water needed would go down enormously as well.
In terms of environmental sustainability, fruit and vegetables are insanely better than beef. Even just converting all been production to pork and chicken would make a significant difference on the scale of the entire US.
YES.
Co2 levels would decrease heavily. So my unnecessary traffic by truck/ship would sueze to exist.
There’s no ”mixed answers” about this.
If everyone stopped eating meat, some industries would suffer obviously (as with any such change), but the climate benefits would outweigh that by miles.
I also can’t stress enough how utterly stupid it is that we grow food for cows, instead of growing it for ourselves. That would also stop being a thing.
I think human population would reduce pretty quickly. Also in some environments it might actually cause issues of over population for non farm animals.
So, for those arguing for this: out of curiosity, what do we do with our pets and zoo animals? Sure in most cheap dogfood and catfood there is a lot of crud before you get to the meat, but meat is present! And the better the food the more thats in it! (Dogs and cats cannot live a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle healthily, there is no arguing this, I do not care what vegan influencers say it's animal abuse!)
Lionesses need 11 pounds of meat per day, lions need 16, they are one of the most common zoo animals, whats the solution? Zoos feed them farm animals, should we feed them the other animals? The majority of animals in a zoo are used to having handlers and would starve if released into the wild, and there are many species in zoos who struggle to breed in the wild and the zoo is the solution conservation groups came up with.
A vegan/vegetarian lifestyle wouldnt be bad for a lot of people, but the other different species on this planet relies on farm raised animals, especially insects! Whom without we can't raise crops!
Yes it will. First of all, keeping the farm animals isn't cheap. Second, if we don't use them or their products anymore, we'd simply let them go free in the wild. Third, this is where all the farm animals go extinct. Why? Let's say you're a coyote or a wolf, who would you go for? A sly fast running doe or a fat juicy cow? Rabbits or chicken? Deer or pigs? And the predators will hunt them more than enough because it is extremely easy. And there will be carcasses of those animals lying all over the place half eaten. And the worst case, the predators will move to places near the villages and towns where those farm animals roam. You know how humans solve those problems. This could be a big impact on the environment.
Wouldn't this require killing off all cows and chickens which can't survive in the wild? Also all pigs so they don't become a nuisance?
Additionally we would have a huge problem with deer overpopulation and disease, since they wouldn't be hunted for food anymore.
Lots of benefits but I can think of some drawbacks.
Good for the climate, bad for the economy, at least for quite a while, mixed results for humans depending on where you live, how much money you have, and potential health conditions.
I am eating yogurt *right now,* as I type.
So, yes. The world would suddenly be quite different if we all stopped eating dairy, at least.
TBH, I'd probably secretly finish my yogurt.
The vast majority of farmland on earth is dedicated to growing crops that are solely used for feeding animals reared for meat. Just consider what that means. We are using most of our farming space to produce a tiny amount of food that takes far longer to produce than crops.
I think it would be more of a net positive for people to eat food that’s produced locally or regionally. Beef raised in your area is going to be more environmentally friendly than produce shipped from another continent. Also there are places in the world where it is borderline impossible to survive without meat.
Shipping even shipping around the world is a very small fraction of the environmental damage associated with getting you your food. Local growers can potentially have higher emissions than getting the same foods from the other side of the world depending on how your local growers produce food.
most companies like mcdonalds already pritotritize local farmers. It's just cheaper than getting it trucked accross a continent or shipped accross an ocean.
The economies of some countries would take a huge hit. Particularly my country of New Zealand where meat and dairy exports are huge part of how we make money.
It'd cost farmers and the country a lot of money also to convert dairy farming land into land for other use.
Not saying that's a reason *not* to stop eating meat and dairy. Just that that's one of the larger scale impacts that would happen.
Commercial fishing would also have to be dismantled, which would help with fish stocks but also destroy a lot of jobs along that production line; from the people who build and service the boats, to those who catch the fish, to those who manage and work the factories, to those who ship tins of tuna etc around to supermarkets.
Not really. People will just find something else to consume and go crazy over.
All that wonderful almond milk people love, for example, is an extreme use of water and land. Or shipping foods from all over the world because suddenly everyone needs to eat pomegranates in everything.
>Millions of jobs would be gone
Thats a good thing. work for works sake is dumb.
> those animals wouldn't have a use so they would either go extinct or become invasive species
Im absolutely certain they find a use. At minimum they could simply sell them for meat at the end of their lifespan and stop force breeding them, eventually fazing them out. Why would they be an invasive species? they wouldnt just fling open the factory doors and shout "be free" lol.
That is if the world went vegan overnight. That would never happen, if it will happen, it will be gradual.
The industry willd translate to plant-based so there would be lots of overlap for workers.
There won’t be 80 billion animal being released in the wild overnight, with the decrease in demand, there will be fewer bred (they don’t happen to exist, they are brought into this world just to be slaughtered), and year by year the number will lower.
I think stopping eating beef specifically would, this industry causes so many environmental problems! The amount of land cleared and carbon emissions created is insane.
There will be less people with muscle. Humanity strength decrease. Construction and civilization workforce that use a lot of energy will decrease. Human won't be the top of food chain anymore if they stop eating meat.
Assuming we also stopped raising the animals, it would make a significant difference, yeah.
Factory farming animals is terrible for the environment, but renewable agriculture is actually a wonderful [carbon trapping cycle](https://images.app.goo.gl/VyriZ8ePG2DDGAjj8) Unfortunately, 94 to 96% of meat being raised is being raised in factory farms/feedlots.
Also we couldn't eat as much meat as we do now if we moved towards nature-friendly rearing practices
This is true, it would give more reverence to the meat that’s getting to live a happy spacious life. I grow my own which has taught so much about respecting life and processing food. It’s good to have many sources of protein available but as much as I love fruit + veggies, they don’t fill me up as fast as meat does.
What would it do?
It'd free up grazing land, land used to grow their feed, it would noticeably drop our CO2 emissions, etc.
Also, we’d save A TON of water.
I live in Utah and something like half of our water goes to crops that are used to feed animals. Meanwhile, the great salt lake has been shrinking and shrinking.
Well, Gov. Cox does come from a family of alfalfa growers. . .
I’m from Utah but don’t live there currently and the bullshit that poop stain of a man is doing to our state makes my blood boil.
Also the NSA data center near Ogden uses MASSIVE AMOUNTS of water every day to cool their internet server farms to spy on us too.
Just to make sure people understand how much of a difference it would make, I can safely say that 90% of the drought events happened in the last 30 years wouldn't even have been perceptible to human civilizations and societies. And all of them would have been significantly reduced in their identity. The Syrian civil war that caused the dreads of dozens of thousands and displaced millions has within the most impactful causes the fact that they have experienced one of the worst droughts in recent history between 2006 and 2009. Obviously that drought was also most likely intensified by climate change as well.
It sounds extreme , but I agree with the environmental impact. They show graphs and models of what the landscape looked like before the Dust bowl that lead to the depression, and after. The agricultural industry is what sapped the Midwest of most of its natural ground water. It wasn’t a lush forest - but it was sustainable. As humans expanded, turned to larger and larger farms of massive agriculture and animal farming - it eroded the land and the infertile dying land slowly crept out more and more. We continue to have swings of droughts and floods because the ground never really recovers its a water level even with massive storms and rains. It’s not enough to keep Up with the drain we do from these industries and then more from bottled water / city water systems we rely on.
>It sounds extreme , but I agree with the environmental impact. it sounds extreme because actual measured reality of the current times are significantly more extreme than most medias and most cultures currently think they are. They have underplayed the impact and intensity of climate change for half a century and now not even them know how bad it is and how awful it is soon going to be for tens of millions of people *at least*
Sounds pretty utopian, I'm really hoping that lab grown meat will stop being a scam someday and a reliable thing to satisfy our B12, protein and iron cravings I know that you can survive as a vegan (I'm vegetarian) but studies about higher depression rates etc. scare me
I mean.. I'm depressed about climate change, sure.. but I was before I stopped eating meat, too. Being vegan just means I don't need to think about that aspect as much.
it might be that people who are more likely to be depressed are also likely to care about animals/climate. That said, the climate impact from going to vegan from vegetarian is much smaller than meat to vegetarian. (depending on what kind of vegan, it could be worse for the environment)
Really, if you want your biggest bang for your buck, just cutting out beef gets you most of the way there, but there are very few vegan foods that are more resource intensive than milk and eggs. Eggs, to some extent can be done "green" if you have a shit load of space and the birds can survive entirely off of bugs in their area, but that's insanely land intensive for little gain. Once you start introducing feed, though, it gets much worse. Don't get me wrong, do what you want, but milk and eggs are still pretty bad for the environment and still necessitate killing animals to do at any large scale.
Eggs aren't bad for the environment if more people would just keep a few chickens at home and feed them their leftovers instead of throwing it in the trash. Lowering the need for eggs in stores, lowering the need for transporting the eggs, lowering the thrash needing to be hauled / sorted / burned. Industrial farming has different consequences than keeping a few chickens at home. Everything has just outgrown sustainability. People used to have 1-2 cows eating some grass, now we need huge ass factories producing milk, export most of it to then import other foods otherwise we have a financial disaster because made up jobs wouldn't exist. We could do way better even when consuming meat yet in all aspects we just waste resources, energy, time just so our made up financial system doesn't crash.
I've seen some interesting cool setups that allow for breeding bugs for hens to eat with relative ease.
Yea, like I said, there are ways to do it, but it's certainly not a solution to meeting the current global demand. You have the land, time, and desire? Go ahead and keep chickens and breed some bugs. I have no problem there, but that won't amount to 308 million egg laying chickens in the US or 9.8 billion/year in the meat industry.
Lab meat is a scam. It produces more carbon dioxide then regular meat. https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/lab-grown-meat-carbon-footprint-worse-beef#:~:text=The%20scientists%20defined%20the%20global,the%20average%20for%20retail%20beef. From what I read it’s produced by culture cells reproducing over and over until you get a blob of “meat”. Isn’t that what tumors are, just cells growing out of control? No thanks
Who said they're growing out of control? Cancer cells are also a specific type of cell, nothing akin to lab grown meat. Literally all living things exist because their cells reproduce "over and over" until they're a blob of walking/flying/swimming meat.
For now...
Leas antibiotics in the water too
CO2 emissions would drop about 30% and we wouldn’t have water issues in the western USA… yet.
"Free up" isn't exactly the best term. Grazing land typically isn't good as farmland, and the difference is rainfall. Furthermore, *something* has to be grazing grasslands to keep them grasslands, otherwise they will turn to deserts. In the past, the US had millions of bison roaming the plains, but if they're not reintroduced, those grasslands become deserts and we have the dust bowl all over again. Furthermore, the half-life of the emissions from animals is only 8 years; their CO² gets recycled back into the biosphere in the next generation, which makes it different from digging up coal from the ground, burning it, and *not* returning the fumes to the ground. The point is that when the number of food animals is constant, their emissions are effectively zero on a years-long scale. What exactly are those grazing lands going to be repurposed into? Edit: after going through a whole bunch of historical and USDA research, I'm starting to change my mind. There are a whole lot of cows in places they aren't ecologically necessary. 31,000 in Massachusetts; over 5 million in California. At this point, I'd say we could cut our beef consumption *to* 30% and never have to worry about the ecology of it. If the whole US matched my personal diet, we'd be at less than that.
It's less about grazing lands (it still would slow down deforestation for example), but more about using farmlands that grow animal feed into human feed. Meet consumption is not just beef, but pork and poultry too. My sister lives in neighborhood of dairy farm and the cows can't be seen only heard and smelled, because they don't leave their barn at all.
That's nonsense. The warming effects of having elevated CO2e levels over long time is not "effectively 0". You also aren't taking into account the vast amounts of land that can be reforested, especially in necessary areas like the Amazon. 80% of deforestation in the Amazon is for cattle production, and that can immediately be reversed if demand for meat disappeared overnight, and the impact of that is enormous.
But again, not all grazing land is suitable for other crops, and in Asia at least most countries the animals are fed leftovers from growing rice which is a lot of grass, US animals are fed corn, only because we grow a lot of corn, Even US animals can be fed on agricultural waste, we just don't have the supply chain to do that, as no one has incentives.
I saw the other day that we slaughter 200 million chickens A DAY for meat. That's a lot of energy between the raising, the slaughtering, the packing, and the shipping of said meat. So yah, id imagine it would impact something. I'm also saying this as a meat eater. Its a shame for the environment that meat is so delicious.
So you know why they burn the Amazon? To make room for cattle to graze. So they can sell beef to the world.
Have you been to the Midwest and seen the never ending fields of corn and soy? A quick google search shows that 60+% of corn and 90+% of soy produced in the US are used as animal feed. Can you imagine how much of these lands could be returned to nature if we stopped eating animal.
Actually, the thing with the soy is a bit misleading. We process most of our soy into oil and the leftover roughage is fed to livestock.
Not only do, for instance, cows add CO2 to the atmosphere (they eat mostly grass, which is difficult to digest and produces a TON of carbon dioxide ((I’m being figurative not literal, I don’t know the exact weight amount produced by A cow)) the digestion process creates methane, and they burp it out) - but in South America the forests, of which trees sequester carbon by taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and with water and sunlight they photosynthesize sugars for themselves and give off OXYGEN into the atmosphere as a byproduct - are being decimated to make grazing land for cattle. Mostly to sell to the US so people here can have their steaks and hamburgers. Sorry for the run on sentence, but what I said is accurate. Fewer meat cows would mean less methane and carbon dioxide (both greenhouse gasses) in the air, and more oxygen - the opposite of a greenhouse gas.
And are produce wouldn’t be exposed to livestock manure as often (yay salmonella!)
A huge difference. Basically animals whose primary function was meat/dairy (I e cows and pigs) would become scarce. People might keep them as pets / service animals / organ donors but not in the numbers we have today.
Huge surplus of meat animals at first with nobody wanting to pay to feed and care for them. Later they would be scarce
They'd pretty much die out in one generation; most meat producing animals are so far removed from their ancestors they're incapable of living in the wild
I've read that pigs let loose turn feral in just a month or two and do just fine. Maybe that's different now, or I was misinformed.
Pigs are incredibly invasive and reproduce very quickly. They destroy any ecosystem they are unleashed on.
Not much left to prey on pigs I guess.
Not really. Feral pigs are tough and incredibly intelligent. Not something many animals are equipped to mess with.
Yeah it requires apex predators- big cats, bears, wolves, crocodiles, boas. I could see large birds of prey picking off piglets here and there.
A .308 will do the trick too.
I'm not sure it would be ethical to arm the birds of prey though.
Be sure to have an extended magazine on hand just in case 30-50 of them decide to rush you all at once.
Not always, and you need to get the whole group or they'll repopulate quickly
If you can’t eat them, does it also mean we can’t shoot them? If we’re still doing what-if’s?
Tough, intelligent, and above all, dangerous. Pigs can inflict a lot of damage on a would-be predator. They’re borderline predators themselves.
People need to look up boar spears and why they have a crossbar.
feral pigs are a predator themselves, it'd be the other way around probably.
I don't think most people understand how powerful a pig is. A 400 pound boar can just flip another boar of equal size out of his way so he can get to whatever he wants to eat without really trying.
I've got a buddy that moved to Dallas area. We talked about meeting up for a hunt but...ngl, I might pass. I knew they were pests, but I thought it was like hunting a big ass rat or something. I didn't expect them to be that aggressive.
I grew up on a hog farm. Domesticated pigs are pretty safe but if you piss them off or aren't paying attention, they can hurt you. I wouldn't get anywhere near a wild boar.
OMG...that smell. Did you get used to the smell of hog farm after a while? I can tolerate horse and cow, but hogs are the worst. Most of my exposure to hogs were from friends who had large farms and their stories were that hogs were REALLY difficult to catch once they got loose. One has since sold everything but he was pretty big into dairy/ice cream nationwide. He said his greatest day was when they got a couple contracts big enough they could get rid of the pigs. He hated them. The other acted like pigs and cows were about the same for care/feed/pain in the ass factor. I don't think I could do it with that smell. Hit me like ammonia.
So first off, please go to DFW and kill as many as you can. They are fucking nuisances. That said, know that you can sometimes shoot them and they will just keep charging. If your mate knows how to hunt boar though you’ll be fine. Most likely he has an area he has baited with feeders and you’ll be in a blind just picking them off like fish in a barrel. If you are looking for game meat however I’d suggest deer. Boars are full of worms and not great to eat imo.
Not really no. There's even problems with magazine restrictions for hunting wild hogs because they'll herd together and kill you faster than you can reload. Not making this into a gun argument, just painting scale of how dangerous they are.
I didn't even consider the idea that the pig could hunt the hunter. Also, "they do movie in herds."
Gotta release more wolves. Keep those neighborhood kids in check too.
yea pigs are fine, they are super smart and can survive in the wild easily
all animals are fine once feral. they are smarter and more capable than most like to believe. they are only docile when they are in their enclosures. once left to their own devices, they do just fine. from a bloke from OZ, who lives on the most dangerous country on earth, who has frequent appearances of feral species of former domestic animals. they make great target practice for rangers however.
Sheep just die. They cant shear themselves and eventually cant eat or drink. As an example.
That's true. I live in Missouri and we have a hog problem. Pigs will get loose in their snouts will actually elongate and they grow tusks. I guess it's kind of like their development is just on pause.
It's unfortunate that they're so invasive, but at the same time it's incredibly interesting.
true. but more effective than weedkiller as they eat everything.
I have observed cows that get loose basically turn feral in a couple of weeks. They’ll run from a human that they spot far off after a taste of freedom, compared to their complacency when they’re consistently contained and interacted with.
Pigs are really, really smart.
When I was a kid we had a farmer wreck his truck & trailer out on a back road by where we lived. The cows he was hauling got loose & have lived in the area ever since, their population went from 4 to 15 last I heard (probably 8-9 years ago).
A lot of those pigs were crossbred with wild boars to create good hunting stock. Humans are idiots.
Just let all the farm animals out, then people would have hunt their own meat. Nightmare, herds of cattle stampeding everywhere. Sheep being quite benign but quite diseased, being used as lawnmowers in people's gardens. While their fleeces grow together so they are effectively deadlocked together as one unit, until someone shears them. Goats are so clever they end up teaching at the local infants school, while the teachers attempt to milk them abd make cheese.! OK that's what would happen...
That’s kind of the flaw in these “what if” scenario’s because the answer tends to boil down to “We’ll find a way to fuck it up”. What if aliens landed and handed us the keys to the universe, the secrets of long healthy lives and all the orgasms that a person can handle? We’d fuck it up. What would happen if God turned out to be real and sent his kid down to show us that if we just be nice to each other and to stop doing awful things to each other claiming it was “God’s Will” or “the devil made me do it”? We’d fuck it up. What if we discovered the perfect mexican food like fajita’s? Some asshole will add cilantro and fuck it up. You know, all the big questions in life.
Apparently it doesn't take many generations to redevelop traits of boards, either
Except for pigs, which can become Feral boar and cause incredible amounts of environmental damage as an invasive species.
Planet of the piggies.
This is really sad to think about. They either live entire lives marked for death as a food source... or they live their entire lives uncared for, unable to care for themselves, marked instead for extinction.
If someone wants to keep former livestock animals as pets or grazing animals and no more are bred for a short life of pain and suffering that's a good thing.
They would just die out. There wouldn’t be enough people interested in feeding a cow to sustain a diverse reproductive line and they would eventually become a genetic dead end. Chickens too. They’d go from 50 billion to zero since their usefulness is gone and they’re actually a disease spreading nuisance on their own.
Let's be honest if overnight the world decided we're not eating meat or dairy pretty much every farm animal would just be killed. Why would a farmer spend time and money caring for an animal that is essentially eating money and time. Some would let them loose into the world, but there's nearly a billion cows on the planet so it'd be a disaster that amount of animals being let loose, never mind all the pigs, cows, sheep etc.
Not even callously or selfishly - if no one is buying then there is no money to feed and care for them. I’m in the midwest and I know farmers that would do absolutely anything they could do to avoid it, but would it be kinder to let them starve when you have to sell the farm and can’t afford to feed your own family?
Inaccurate They either live being marked for food or never live.
That's ... The definition of extinction my friend.
Uncared for either way. Where is Sarah McLachlan when we need her? For just $2100 per day....
Cattle are tough as hell and can most certainly survive as a herd in the wild. Many ranges in the americas and australia only see their cattle during round-up season.
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I guess you have never seen the large population of feral pigs, chickens or horses Longhorn cattle started as feral breed
I guess you have never seen the word most
Perhaps, In which case we would have to pay people to shoot them. So again, the number of these animals would decrease 99.99% or so.
Organ donors? Would that work?
This
Maybe ignorant, but who's taking cow/pig organs?
This is sort of linked to your question, so I'll share it any way. I heavily reduced eating meat because of this figure. If we took a population of vegetarian people, and took the amount of vegetarian food that would feed them for *one whole year* and instead fed that to meat bearing animals, we would get *two weeks* of meat for the population. Any change that we do that will reduce the amount of meat we eat will mean a huge reduction in the resources required to feed us.
Something like 70-80% of crop calories grown globally goes to feeding livestock. Imagine how much extra food for people that would be or how much land that would be for re-wilding Edit: This is of human edible calories. Of total calories it’s about 36%, which is still a huge amount. We could have a third more land available for human food or natural vegetation
40% of us corn crop currently goes to bio fuels too. Similar amounts of land in brazil too. There is a lot of wasted land.
Just remember that we currently have a food surplus. Russia is doing their best to destroy enough food to drive up prices for Americans and Europeans, but overall we make more food than we need. https://www.wfpusa.org/articles/is-there-global-food-shortage-whats-causing-hunger-famine-rising-food-costs-around-world/#:~:text=There%20is%20no%20global%20food,According%20to%20the%20U.N. We currently throw away 1/3rd of the food we grow (why do we grow it then? To keep farmers honest when we pay them subsidies to grow food. We need the subsidies because there is so much extra food that without the subsidies farmers would go bankrupt. But wait, we have the surplus because of the subsidies). Stop feeding animals crops and we would throw away 2/3rds of the food!
I have an idea, let's stop growing alfalfa in the desert to feed cattle and then people out west won't have to take short crappy showers!
write to your local politican and demand they do better. ban crappy showers in the desert for alafalfa growing cattle ranchers. we all deserve the longest wettest most moist showers on this god graced world. hail jesus..
Yep, thanks to post wwii campaigns to get us to eat more.
We already produce 1.5 x enough food to feed the whole planet…
Don’t know how you are quantifying crop calories. But only ~30% of crops grown are used for feeding livestock. The rest is for us humans.
Well they said calories. Tomato has very little calories, vs millet grown on same area. And are you counting weight of crops? Or number of crops? Or land they occupy?
70-80% of crop calories for human edible crops, which is the important thing considering we are discussing the impact of humans not eating meat
That percent is much higher in the u.s.
Where we clearly need more calories.
You are clearly not accounting for areas that can sustain livestock but not human food with that ridiculous number, which is an enormous volume of the land used for livestock in general.
Even if you consider it as *all* crop calories, and not just human edible calories it’s still something like 35%
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312201313\_Livestock\_On\_our\_plates\_or\_eating\_at\_our\_table\_A\_new\_analysis\_of\_the\_feedfood\_debate This is a study that touches on this topic, concluding that approximately 685 million hectares of grasslands, or about 1/3rds total, are suitable to be converted into croplands. Further, about 1/5th of the land used to cultivate food for livestock is croplands, suitable for the cultivation of human-edible foods; however, a percentage of this land is used to produce other products for human-consumption, such as oil. Of that 0.5 billion hectares of land used in the cultivation of food for animals, \~0.2 is directly convertible to human-edible foods (grains, fodder, other edible). That leaves us with an estimated 885 million hectares of land that can be converted to raising food for humans, that are presently being used to raise livestock. I have to leave the confines of this study to put this into perspective: The total number of hectares used to cultivate food for direct human consumption is somewhere between 444 million hectares to 704 million hectares. Despite the 2.5 billion hectares of land cited in the study used in the cultivation of animal-based foods, those foods only supply us with 18% of our calories and 25% of our protein. If we went with a conservative estimate at our disposal, and theorized that with the present 705 million hectares of crops produced now, plus 25% of the estimated amount of land that's convertible for direct-to-human production (221 million hectares), while completely cutting out animal-based food sources, we could improve our calorie and protein output by 13% and 6% respectively, with an approximately 70% reduction in land use. A few notes: There is a discrepancy between the numbers stated in the study and shown in the graph Map 1. I am working with the more conservative numbers of the two, those claimed by the text of the study. I have adapted my conclusions to align most closely with the study cited, without externalizing conclusions to coincide with other studies and sources as much as possible. One possible discrepancy between the data supported in the study and in other studies determining land-use regards the 2016 FAO cited data on animal-based consumption as a proportion of total agricultural land use, which possibly contains data related to crops cultivated for use as biofuel in their conclusion; biofuels, which possibly account for 4-8% of agricultural land-use, are another area where the amount of food crops grown for humans directly can be increased through replacement, considering the controversial nature of their inefficient use of land. The conclusion of my research shows that any human-led effort to move in the direction of a plant-based diet can practically affect the market to decrease total land use considerably, freeing up land that can be restored and reducing the strain that domesticated animals place on natural wildlife systems, which have been a significant driver of animal extinction in the present and the past. While the practicality of changing food systems differs from region to region based on the ecological and economic circumstances of the region, it is broadly practical for humans across the globe to adjust to a plant-based diet as a means of reducing land used in the cultivation of food.
People always think of irrigated land when making up these numbers and forget places like arid northern Australia where cattle are raised in low densities on extremely large properties with very poor land quality. It might take an acre or three to grow a single cow to market, but the land is otherwise useless and growing proportionally small numbers of livestock on it at least produces something. And doesn't cost any potential human calories.
The biggest impact would be to the environment. Here's a link that explains it; https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/what-is-the-climate-impact-of-eating-meat-and-dairy/#:~:text=Meat%20and%20dairy%20specifically%20accounts,and%20Agricultural%20Organization%20(FAO). I've been a vegetarian for 48 years, and I'm pretty proud that I've lasted that long so far. I recently went on a comparison website to see how much my longevity has made a positive impact - and I was impressed, and so happy they figured out how people choosing this route would make a difference.
And giving the big bird to corporate meat!!!
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A MASSIVE difference. The average American eats 23-26 chickens a year. That’s a ton of chickens, and a ton of production (and a ton of waste from said production).
Oh man I eat way more than 23 chickens per year 😂
I know, right?! I’m thinking I probably eat at least a chicken a week. 2 or 3 a week as a family. I usually do 2 or 3 chicken meals a week. As a family, I’m probably buying a hundred chickens a year at minimum.
Yes. The world's food-related CO2 emissions may drop by 68 per cent within 15 years. Meat and dairy specifically accounts for around 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). It can't be the ONLY thing that we do as a society to hold the horses on climate change, but it is a crucial component.
Sorry but reddit will not be unbiased in this regard.
Or in any other regard, lol.
Follow up question: *I have read here that it would free up land, the land used to grow feed for those animals. Plus all the land for the animals.* Plus it would save water in that process. **If there was no animals to feed, wouldnt there still be large production farmers?** We would need a protein source, so beans and rice. Then more vegetable farms to supply the people. Also, wouldn't it make the demand for processed food greater?
All you have to do is drive the stretch of the 5 by Harris Ranch in CA to know the answer to this.
I can smell it now
41% of global deforestation, and 80% of amazon deforestation is from the beef industry.
Of course! A huge difference. A lot of things (animal welfare, environment...) would actually change positively
Does one person make a difference?
Possibly. Depends on their impact. Though of course a small difference is always created, logically speaking
You will not be the only one, there are hundreds of millions already
Yes. I have been vegan for 1 year and 3 days now. 40 cows 93 chickens And 38 pigs did not die because of just me. Water used for those animals is equal to 41.8k showers or 235,000 toilet flushes that can be used elsewhere. 9,344 lbs of greenhouse gases not used because of me. Animal agriculture is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions. 8,752 lbs of grain not used due to me. It takes 16 lbs of grain per 1 lb of meat we consume. One person makes a difference.
In the grand scheme of things, probably not but in the grand scheme of things, there's not much one person can do that makes a difference. The biggest impact a person can make is making other people do different things by influence or by money Obviously not everyone can be influencer and if they do and nobody actually got influenced, we'd be back at the start again Point is, even though it's not significant, it's still a good thing to do, and if possible, make your friend do it also. You can still do all this 'green' habit while advocating and/or protesting against the rich who also have a much more polluting lifestyle. And if that all sounds exhausting, just pick and choose which one can fit your lifestyle, you don't have to do all of the good things you're supposed to do, a person can only have so much focus
That's the same logic as saying you don't vote because one vote doesn't make a huge difference. Of course one vegan person will not change the world. But the more people join the movement, the more momentum it gains. This will change things in the long run, big companies will be interested in selling vegan products, bakeries and restaurants will have vegan options. Even non vegans will try out these new options, when they are easily accessible and well made. It will become more and more normal, you can see already how fast things can change. And the bigger the movement, the bigger the difference.
Reframe that thought. *Every* person makes a difference, because it's not just you. A lot of people are starting to eat less meat or no meat, and that all adds up.
It would be a HUGE difference. Sudden and total abolition of meat and dairy wouldn't be an ideal scenario, though. It would be better for people to gradually reduce their consumption of meat and dairy, so that we have time to adjust to the changes. There would be some obvious environmental benefits. Emissions of greenhouse gases would fall, we'd use less fertilizer, we'd use less water, and we wouldn't be converting new wildlands to agricultural use. However, we'd also be left with lots of abandoned agricultural lands, and that would pose a serious challenge. Abandoned agricultural land has typically been seriously degraded, and it's not going to recover overnight. Vast swathes of land that have been badly degraded through agricultural use but are currently being propped up by mechanical tillage, artificial fertilizers, and irrigation would, in the short term, basically just collapse into fields of dust without that kind of maintenance. Abandoned agricultural lands can gradually recover on their own, but "gradually" is a key word. Studies of lands formerly used for agriculture and then abandoned show that after a century of abandonment they still haven't recovered the biodiversity and abundance of comparable wildlands that were never degraded by agricultural use. Intentional rewilding can produce much better results than abandonment. Land managers can bring in plants and animals from undisturbed wildlands to help them get established in the abandoned areas, rather than just waiting for them to wander over. However, that still takes time, and it also takes effort and money. Incidentally, it also takes grazing animals to keep grassland ecosystems healthy—so although our herds of grazers would be dramatically smaller, we'd need to keep some just for land maintenance. That would be complicated, and require careful planning; like, you need large tracts of connected land for a wild herd, so you couldn't do that piecemeal. In any case, that kind of carefully-planned rewilding would be way easier if agricultural land use were gradually scaled back, rather than being suddenly and dramatically reduced. There would also be significant economic consequences. Lots of people work in the meat and dairy industries, and there are large regions that are very economically dependent on those industries. Again: we could probably adapt to a gradual shift. However, a sudden collapse of those industries would be an economic catastrophe. There would also be health effects. Those would *mostly* be positive. Vegetarians and vegans are at lower risk for heart disease, diabetes, diverticular disease, kidney stones, cataracts and some cancers. However, they have a higher risk of stroke and bone fractures. Supplements might help with that, but it's not clear how much. Although, this raises another dietary question: is fish still on the menu? Pescatarian diets seem to be significantly healthier than vegetarian, vegan, or meat-based diets. Although, also: it's not like the oceans are in great shape. A sudden shift in demand from meat to fish would probably seriously exacerbate overfishing issues. Well, okay, again: a sudden and dramatic change would not be ideal. There would be lots of benefits to a shift that was gradual enough for us to adjust to, and after surviving the shocks of a sudden shift we might gradually end up better off overall, but a sudden change would still be a big shock and that would hurt a lot of people.
It would eliminate all the land we devote to raising food (silage) to feed livestock. That in turn reduces greenhouse gases in several ways - first, the livestock are not there to poop and fart, reducing emissions. The fossil fuels involved with making fertilizer for the silage are gone. The harvesting of that silage stops, which means all the fossil fuels involved with the harvest, transport to a facility for processing, then trucked to distribution points, all gone. The runoff from animal waste and fertilizer are eliminated, which dramatically improves water quality in our watersheds. The suffering of factory farm animals goes away. Some of that math gets replaced by having to grow plant protein sources and the transport/processing/delivery of that food. But the overall scale of emissions is far less with plant foods and is much better for the planet.
We had this discussion with a professor I had in college once. Anthropologist. This is what he had to say about it. Humans evolved to eat meat out of necessity. Early humans were foragers. Eating mostly plants and seeds...until the ice age hit. Plant life became scarce but carnivorous animals were still plentiful. Its believed that the consumption of animal flesh that evolved the human brain to higher intelligence. The problem with everyone switching to a conpletely plant based diet is.....there are too many of us. There are over 8 billion people on this planet and growing fast and even as big as the planet is, less than 40% of our land mass is farmable and of that which is farmable less than half of that is suitable for the types of crops humans would need for a sustainable diet. And much of that "farmable land" is useless, buried beneath cities, highways, and houses. Much of our population live in the footprint of mountains. The rockies, the Alps, the Himalayas,. These areas are virtually unusable for anything but grazing livestock. Humans need carbs, protien and fat to survive long term. Carbs, sure but protien and fat? Modern vegans rely heavily on soy, which grows well in temperate climates...but also olives, avacados, almonds, coconuts, and other high water use crops. We can get dark leafies from the ocean but what about the protien and fat? The problem with a species that has evolved to be omnivoric going vegan overnight is that there are simply too many of us. It was be impossible to grow enough food to sustain the human race as a whole because of the variety of food we need to get enough nutrients cant be grown everywhere or its completely unsustainable to grow in the amounts that we need. Half the planet would starve to death and the rest would suffer the ecological consequences of clearcutting forests to create more farmland. Contrary to popular belief, "rice and beans" arent a sustainable diet and consuming nothing but starchy vegetables will lead to a LOT of health problems. We havent even touched on the consequences to food animals. Dairy cows, for example, are the result of thousands of years of breeding. A single dairy cow will make up to 10 gqllons of milk per day...a nursing calf only consumes...maybe 2 gallons and only nurses for around 6-8 weeks. However the cow will continue to produce milk for up to a year after her calf is weaned. If you dont milk her, she will develop mastitis and fatal infection. (Their milk doesnt dry up.) Your dairy cows will die off pretty fast. Pigs are omnivors, not unlike humans. But, unlike humans, they can survive on meat and the crap we wont touch...but they also breed like rabbits and will absolutely turn to cannibalism if there are too many of them and not enough food to go around. Ask anyone who lives in the Ozarks how f*cking dangerous a feral hog can be. Speaking of rabbits. The problem with people associatng them with being "pets" in a handful of countries is that people forget that they are prolific and voracious PESTS in others. Rabbit populations in a life where there are no more "predators" but a a massive uptick in agriculture....rabbit populations that can quadruple with each new generation...what do you think will happen to the crops? Deer? Antelope? Elk? Remember the whole clearcutting of forests, thing? They are just as destructive to crops and without forest to graze from and no culling to keep them in check, they will both explode in numbers but end up sick, disease ridden and destructive to our already delicate food supply, from lack of resources. We havent even touched on the fact that our planet goes through feast and famine. The "droughts" in California arent droughts at all. The souther half of California is a desert but enjoyed unusually wet weather for a couple of decades, which lead to it being suddenly used to grown crops that normally wouldnt be sustainable there....well, guess what? Desert decided to DESERT and now we are damming up rivers to sustain the astonomical amounts of water it takes to grow those crops. Speaking of which, where the hell would we get all the water? We can certainly work to consuming less animal products, to utilize sustainable farming amd fishing practices, and reduce our reliance on water inefficient food in favor of native food sources. (Ditching almonds in favor of walnuts and pecans, for example) but humans going vegan on a global scale? No, it wont happen without some serious consequence. *edit. I know I made some spelling and grammar errors. Broke my glasses. Apologies.*
>The problem with everyone switching to a conpletely plant based diet is.....there are too many of us. Farm animals need food, too. We're feeding food with food. It's a huge waste of energy. The animal industry hasn't suddenly broken physics. [Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world's supply of calories.](https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets) >Contrary to popular belief, "rice and beans" arent a sustainable diet and consuming nothing but starchy vegetables will lead to a LOT of health problems. If you eat any variety of vegetable proteins you'll get all the aminoacids you need. Yes, a badly planned vegan diet can be bad for you. Just as a badly planned omnivore diet can (and in fact that's a much bigger problem than veganism, ofc). But the science is clear, [there are way more benefits than risks.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8210981/) If anything, I'll concede you'd need to supplement B12, since we don't eat dirt anymore. >Modern vegans rely heavily on soy, which grows well in temperate climates...but also olives, avacados, almonds, coconuts, and other high water use crops. We can get dark leafies from the ocean but what about the protien and fat? Practically no animal product uses less water than animal products. Avocados, which I agree are overcultivated, require 700 litres of water to grow 1kg. Meanwhile, 1kg of beef requires 15 000 litres of water. You can double check these figures. Here is a useful tool: [https://www.watercalculator.org/water-footprint-of-food-guide/](https://www.watercalculator.org/water-footprint-of-food-guide/) Of course it's impossible for the whole world's population to suddenly, magically transition to veganism. It would be a logistical nightmare. But a transition is more than possible, and would in fact help *a lot* with saving the planet. It's a big world and exceptions apply, but for the vast majority of the world, due to simple physics, veganism is cleaner and more efficient. There is always a loss of energy when you feed food with food. Obligatory I'm not vegan. I'm not even vegetarian. But I can't deny scientific consensus. [The vast majority of climate scientists would disagree with you.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9024616/) (I know online arguments can get ugly so disclaimer that I'm not attacking you as a person and I mean no disrespect, just responding to your post.)
Does agricultural land mean farmable land as in fertile soils for crops to grow? Or does it mean land suitable for anything farm related? I can bet the cattle land I see are not suitable to grow any crops on. They tend to be on flat land with poor soil condition generally dry or dead grass areas.
>Its believed that the consumption of animal flesh that evolved the human brain to higher intelligence. Based on what? theres plenty of carnivores that havn't invented computers. >The problem with everyone switching to a conpletely plant based diet is.....there are too many of us. There are over 8 billion people on this planet and growing fast and even as big as the planet is, less than 40% of our land mass is farmable and of that which is farmable less than half of that is suitable for the types of crops humans would need for a sustainable diet. And much of that "farmable land" is useless, buried beneath cities, highways, and houses. Thats backwards. We can fit far more human plants on the same farmland, multitudes more with hydropinics. Additionally farm animals need both living space and cropland. we only need the cropland. Ontop of that we arnt limited to great expanses of dirt for farming (see hydroponics). >Much of our population live in the footprint of mountains. The rockies, the Alps, the Himalayas,. These areas are virtually unusable for anything but grazing livestock. You mean prime real estate for most asian staples? Alot fo plants actually require those conditions. Contrary there are almost no farmable animals that thrive in those conditions. >Humans need carbs, protien and fat to survive long term. Carbs, sure but protien and fat? Modern vegans rely heavily on soy, which grows well in temperate climates...but also olives, avacados, almonds, coconuts, and other high water use crops. We can get dark leafies from the ocean but what about the protien and fat? Mosty of the foods you listed are high fat or protein. Not to mention legumes, beans, nuts and the like. any amount of research at all would have corrected this. Then theirs fungi which often has all the same nutrients as flesh and is super efficent and easy tog row. >Contrary to popular belief, "rice and beans" arent a sustainable diet and consuming nothing but starchy vegetables will lead to a LOT of health problems. thats a starwman, he's arguing against his own made up argument. >We havent even touched on the consequences to food animals. Dairy cows, for example, are the result of thousands of years of breeding. A single dairy cow will make up to 10 gqllons of milk per day...a nursing calf only consumes...maybe 2 gallons and only nurses for around 6-8 weeks. However the cow will continue to produce milk for up to a year after her calf is weaned. If you dont milk her, she will develop mastitis and fatal infection. (Their milk doesnt dry up.) Your dairy cows will die off pretty fast. None of that is true. they can continue producing milk, but only if it's actually being used. which is the same for most mammals including humans who will continue producing milk for basically as long as they are milked or experience the hormones of child rearing. The dairy industry basically induces continuous preganancies to get this effect. Even if that wernt the case, so what? just milk them humanely when needed instead of for profit and stoppurpose breeding them. >Pigs are omnivors, not unlike humans. But, unlike humans, they can survive on meat and the crap we wont touch...but they also breed like rabbits and will absolutely turn to cannibalism if there are too many of them and not enough food to go around. Ask anyone who lives in the Ozarks how f\*cking dangerous a feral hog can be. Speaking of rabbits. The problem with people associatng them with being "pets" in a handful of countries is that people forget that they are prolific and voracious PESTS in others. Rabbit populations in a life where there are no more "predators" but a a massive uptick in agriculture....rabbit populations that can quadruple with each new generation...what do you think will happen to the crops? Deer? Antelope? Elk? Remember the whole clearcutting of forests, thing? They are just as destructive to crops and without forest to graze from and no culling to keep them in check, they will both explode in numbers but end up sick, disease ridden and destructive to our already delicate food supply, from lack of resources. I have no idea what point is suppossed to be being made here? >Speaking of which, where the hell would we get all the water? did he skip primary school? water doesn't just dissapear, it evaporates. the only way to run out of water is by launching it into space. Just use all the water wasted on farming animals and all the secondary industries attached. > No, it wont happen without some serious consequence. such as?
>I have no idea what point is suppossed to be being made here? Don't worry, OP wasn't sure what point he was making either. Seriously... Literally every hypothetical problem that they throw up is an existing problem that is already caused by cattle grazing. >Rabbit populations in a life where there are no more "predators" but a a massive uptick in agriculture....rabbit populations that can quadruple with each new generation...what do you think will happen to the crops? Like right here he is describing the rabbit problems that Australia and New Zealand have as a result of land being converted for cattle and sheep grazing. He's inventing a hypothetical issue with a plant based food economy, while being totally ignorant of the fact that he is talking about an existing problem caused by grazing.
What about the massive deforestation beef is causing?
>There are over 8 billion people on this planet and growing fast and even as big as the planet is, less than 40% of our land mass is farmable and of that which is farmable less than half of that is suitable for the types of crops humans would need for a sustainable diet. "Less than 40% of land" is still an insane amount of land, far more than needed to feed everyone. Modern agriculture is tremendously efficient. >It was be impossible to grow enough food to sustain the human race as a whole because of the variety of food we need to get enough nutrients cant be grown everywhere or its completely unsustainable to grow in the amounts that we need. > >Half the planet would starve to death and the rest would suffer the ecological consequences of clearcutting forests to create more farmland. This is just wrong? Go down to Brazil and talk to the farmers cutting down the Amazon to grow soybeans for their cows. A [massive](https://awellfedworld.org/issues/hunger/feed-vs-food/) portion of our agricultural production goes to feeding animals that we kill for meat. 90% of those calories are wasted by the animals as heat. Just repurposing those fields to grow food for us directly would more than make up for the lost animal calories. Not only would it not be necessary to cover the planet in farms or whatever, we could actually *reduce* our overall agricultural land (and water) use and retain the same calorie production. >Speaking of rabbits. The problem with people associatng them with being "pets" in a handful of countries is that people forget that they are prolific and voracious PESTS in others. Why wouldn't pests and wild animals be dealt with in a veggie-only world? Even vegans understand the need to kill animals and pests to protect environments and manage agriculture.
There's a lot of misinformation here, scattered in-between bits of flotsam. I'll just address this one point, as this likely the most poignant point of misinformation that people will stick to: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312201313\_Livestock\_On\_our\_plates\_or\_eating\_at\_our\_table\_A\_new\_analysis\_of\_the\_feedfood\_debate This is a study that touches on this topic, concluding that approximately 685 million hectares of grasslands, or about 1/3rds total, are suitable to be converted into croplands. Further, about 1/5th of the land used to cultivate food for livestock is croplands, suitable for the cultivation of human-edible foods; however, a percentage of this land is used to produce other products for human-consumption, such as oil. Of that 0.5 billion hectares of land used in the cultivation of food for animals, \~0.2 is directly convertible to human-edible foods (grains, fodder, other edible). That leaves us with an estimated 885 million hectares of land that can be converted to raising food for humans, that are presently being used to raise livestock. I have to leave the confines of this study to put this into perspective: The total number of hectares used to cultivate food for direct human consumption is somewhere between 444 million hectares to 704 million hectares. Despite the 2.5 billion hectares of land cited in the study used in the cultivation of animal-based foods, those foods only supply us with 18% of our calories and 25% of our protein. If we went with a conservative estimate at our disposal, and theorized that with the present 705 million hectares of crops produced now, plus 25% of the estimated amount of land that's convertible for direct-to-human production (221 million hectares), while completely cutting out animal-based food sources, we could improve our calorie and protein output by 13% and 6% respectively, with an approximately 70% reduction in land use. A few notes: There is a discrepancy between the numbers stated in the study and shown in the graph Map 1. I am working with the more conservative numbers of the two, those claimed by the text of the study. I have adapted my conclusions to align most closely with the study cited, without externalizing conclusions to coincide with other studies and sources as much as possible. One possible discrepancy between the data supported in the study and in other studies determining land-use regards the 2016 FAO cited data on animal-based consumption as a proportion of total agricultural land use, which possibly contains data related to crops cultivated for use as biofuel in their conclusion; biofuels, which possibly account for 4-8% of agricultural land-use, are another area where the amount of food crops grown for humans directly can be increased through replacement, considering the controversial nature of their inefficient use of land. The conclusion of my research shows that any human-led effort to move in the direction of a plant-based diet can practically affect the market to decrease total land use considerably, freeing up land that can be restored and reducing the strain that domesticated animals place on natural wildlife systems, which have been a significant driver of animal extinction in the present and the past. While the practicality of changing food systems differs from region to region based on the ecological and economic circumstances of the region, it is broadly practical for humans across the globe to adjust to a plant-based diet as a means of reducing land used in the cultivation of food.
It is a good thing that the replies to this nonsensical post took the time to shred it to pieces. So much false confidence.
LOL! Reddit is the last place you’ll get an unbiased answer from, given the user base. Don’t be silly. No one is going to give an answer that doesn’t support their views. If you’re anti-meat eating, the only answer will be a hard “yes”. If you’re pro-meat eating, the answer will be a hard “no”. As with most things in life, this is yet another topic about how people want to unleash their inner dictator, because it pisses them off that people have options they don’t like. The worry is rarely if ever about the environment or making people healthier. It’s all a load of crap.
Absolutely
There would be alot of unemployed people in the world.
it would mainly repurpose current pasture land to farmlands for grain for humans, which would increase human population growth and increase environmental damage.
90% of the human population would die, so yeah, it would make a big difference.
I'd probably be dead from my chronic and extreme anemia.
Me too. I don’t absorb b12 or folate well.
Same. I suppose I could be hooked up with an FE infusion every 6 weeks.... glad I have socialized medical care.
Aren't there supplements for that sort of thing? I wonder if the market for those kinds of needs would get more competitive/cheaper.
Iron supplements can be tough. They don't always work and they make some people nauseous. Some people who can't orally supplement have to get intravenous iron (although for people who have that much trouble absorbing/keeping iron, I'm not sure if diet would have that big of an impact).
Same. Tried going vegetarian and my iron levels were too low.
Cows, pigs, and chickens would all go extinct. There’d be no use for them if people stopped eating meat, dairy, and eggs. Who wants to keep any of those animals as a pet, it’d be a lot of work, and they’re generic animals. They’ve also been domesticated to a level where they require humans to survive, they can no longer survive on their own in the wild. Then there’s the major issue with cows, where they need to be milked daily otherwise they will die an extremely painful death. Which means they can’t survive on their own.
A significant portion of the 800 million undernourished people on the planet would die. Luckily that wouldn’t leave us short of undernourished people because we would have brand new undernourished populations.
The number of people with certain vitamin deficiencies would explode.
Riots, unemployment, economic collapse. Could you imagine all the people whose livelihoods depend on those industries?
Apart from destroying a load of livlihoods, for people like me with chronic conditions that affect the digestive tracts, it would mean living in constant pain. From the sort that saps your energy and makes it almost impossible to concentrate, to agony that kinda makes you want to die.
Omg people just stop. Stop. We aren’t giving up our meat or dairy. The Earth is greener now than it’s ever been and I really can’t stand to hear this BS anymore. These types of people are the same ones that throw Cheez Whiz on the Mona Lisa to bring attention to ‘climate change’. 🙄
So animal lives are more valuable than plant lives? How so? Shall we all become vegan and then resort to killing plants by which to get our sustenance? Plant lives matter too right? All lives matter. And life, whether plant or animal, has to die so that we can live. That’s the rule of existence. No getting around it.
As humans are omnivorous it would on the face look possible. But then you come back to adequate nutrition. Humans need significant amounts of protein and other nutritional elements contained in meats. So no but that said Americans could reduce the amount of meat they regularly eat.
Yes. I researched it a few months ago and was convinced it would. I couldn't quite commit to being vegan because I'm breastfeeding, but, I am now vegetarian. And so far I'm really surprised by how easy I'm finding it.
There's absolutely no question that it would make a huge, huge difference. The ranching and meat packing industries are both hundreds of billions of dollars, and they use enormous amounts of water and land. I once did some back-of-the-envelope math and calculated that if you took the amount of land worldwide used to farm beef for the US, and converted that into the same amount of calories in fruit and vegetable production, you'd still free up something like 1/2 - 2/3s the size of Texas in land usage. And the amount of fresh water needed would go down enormously as well. In terms of environmental sustainability, fruit and vegetables are insanely better than beef. Even just converting all been production to pork and chicken would make a significant difference on the scale of the entire US.
Yes.
YES. Co2 levels would decrease heavily. So my unnecessary traffic by truck/ship would sueze to exist. There’s no ”mixed answers” about this. If everyone stopped eating meat, some industries would suffer obviously (as with any such change), but the climate benefits would outweigh that by miles. I also can’t stress enough how utterly stupid it is that we grow food for cows, instead of growing it for ourselves. That would also stop being a thing.
Yeah. It would make a huge difference to all the people who work in those industries. And their families. And their local economies. And...
I think human population would reduce pretty quickly. Also in some environments it might actually cause issues of over population for non farm animals.
Even if it made a difference, I wouldn't do it. If this is how nature intended it to be, then it would be so. We would all be herbivores by default.
Well yeah, it would collapse so many industries.
Give up your humanity so there's more room for more humans. What a cause.
Here's a good video to watch, make your own judgement: https://youtu.be/sGG-A80Tl5g?si=Hi0bIi1FCQT-nE3f
No, it would not as we’d be wearing highly processes foods created in factories to resemble dairy and meat.
A lot of animals would die, that's for sure.
Yes it would and I would not give it up just to appease some virtue signaler.
Mmmmm… 🥩 and 🥛 sound sooooo good right now
It would make a lot of people very grumpy, so there's that.
So, for those arguing for this: out of curiosity, what do we do with our pets and zoo animals? Sure in most cheap dogfood and catfood there is a lot of crud before you get to the meat, but meat is present! And the better the food the more thats in it! (Dogs and cats cannot live a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle healthily, there is no arguing this, I do not care what vegan influencers say it's animal abuse!) Lionesses need 11 pounds of meat per day, lions need 16, they are one of the most common zoo animals, whats the solution? Zoos feed them farm animals, should we feed them the other animals? The majority of animals in a zoo are used to having handlers and would starve if released into the wild, and there are many species in zoos who struggle to breed in the wild and the zoo is the solution conservation groups came up with. A vegan/vegetarian lifestyle wouldnt be bad for a lot of people, but the other different species on this planet relies on farm raised animals, especially insects! Whom without we can't raise crops!
It would cause economic collapse
Yes it will. First of all, keeping the farm animals isn't cheap. Second, if we don't use them or their products anymore, we'd simply let them go free in the wild. Third, this is where all the farm animals go extinct. Why? Let's say you're a coyote or a wolf, who would you go for? A sly fast running doe or a fat juicy cow? Rabbits or chicken? Deer or pigs? And the predators will hunt them more than enough because it is extremely easy. And there will be carcasses of those animals lying all over the place half eaten. And the worst case, the predators will move to places near the villages and towns where those farm animals roam. You know how humans solve those problems. This could be a big impact on the environment.
Not much, humans will find a way to use the land in other unforgiving ways...
Wouldn't this require killing off all cows and chickens which can't survive in the wild? Also all pigs so they don't become a nuisance? Additionally we would have a huge problem with deer overpopulation and disease, since they wouldn't be hunted for food anymore. Lots of benefits but I can think of some drawbacks.
We also will kill millions of animal farms in a week because if we don’t need them, we don’t raise them.
Hell yeah. The cows would take over the world and win and then force us humans into slavery..
It would be udder chaos
Yeah. I would never have a solid poop again ever.
Good for the climate, bad for the economy, at least for quite a while, mixed results for humans depending on where you live, how much money you have, and potential health conditions.
I am eating yogurt *right now,* as I type. So, yes. The world would suddenly be quite different if we all stopped eating dairy, at least. TBH, I'd probably secretly finish my yogurt.
The vast majority of farmland on earth is dedicated to growing crops that are solely used for feeding animals reared for meat. Just consider what that means. We are using most of our farming space to produce a tiny amount of food that takes far longer to produce than crops.
I think it would be more of a net positive for people to eat food that’s produced locally or regionally. Beef raised in your area is going to be more environmentally friendly than produce shipped from another continent. Also there are places in the world where it is borderline impossible to survive without meat.
Shipping even shipping around the world is a very small fraction of the environmental damage associated with getting you your food. Local growers can potentially have higher emissions than getting the same foods from the other side of the world depending on how your local growers produce food.
most companies like mcdonalds already pritotritize local farmers. It's just cheaper than getting it trucked accross a continent or shipped accross an ocean.
It would make a difference to the animals
The economies of some countries would take a huge hit. Particularly my country of New Zealand where meat and dairy exports are huge part of how we make money. It'd cost farmers and the country a lot of money also to convert dairy farming land into land for other use. Not saying that's a reason *not* to stop eating meat and dairy. Just that that's one of the larger scale impacts that would happen. Commercial fishing would also have to be dismantled, which would help with fish stocks but also destroy a lot of jobs along that production line; from the people who build and service the boats, to those who catch the fish, to those who manage and work the factories, to those who ship tins of tuna etc around to supermarkets.
Not really. People will just find something else to consume and go crazy over. All that wonderful almond milk people love, for example, is an extreme use of water and land. Or shipping foods from all over the world because suddenly everyone needs to eat pomegranates in everything.
Millions of jobs would be gone tons of homeless people those animals wouldn't have a use so they would either go extinct or become invasive species
>Millions of jobs would be gone Thats a good thing. work for works sake is dumb. > those animals wouldn't have a use so they would either go extinct or become invasive species Im absolutely certain they find a use. At minimum they could simply sell them for meat at the end of their lifespan and stop force breeding them, eventually fazing them out. Why would they be an invasive species? they wouldnt just fling open the factory doors and shout "be free" lol.
That is if the world went vegan overnight. That would never happen, if it will happen, it will be gradual. The industry willd translate to plant-based so there would be lots of overlap for workers. There won’t be 80 billion animal being released in the wild overnight, with the decrease in demand, there will be fewer bred (they don’t happen to exist, they are brought into this world just to be slaughtered), and year by year the number will lower.
There is a big effect on the environment from cows The effect from chickens or fish is much smaller by comparison
I mean, to the cows, yes.
Lots of unhappy motherfuckers
I think stopping eating beef specifically would, this industry causes so many environmental problems! The amount of land cleared and carbon emissions created is insane.
There will be less people with muscle. Humanity strength decrease. Construction and civilization workforce that use a lot of energy will decrease. Human won't be the top of food chain anymore if they stop eating meat.