it's because of climate change, cows and chicken use too much space, resources (water, crop), so we're burning down big regions (amazon rainforest) to have enough space. We also can't feed the whole world with meat, so we can either go all vegan or have a different way of producing meat, so why not skipping the whole animal part?
Slashing and burning rainforest to farm cattle or raise crops are both bad options given how critical the Amazon is to maintaining climate and biodiversity.
Either way, the amount of land and water required to raise each lb of beef is an order of magnitude greater than the amount needed for a pound of chicken, which is in turn an order of magnitude higher than the resources needed for a pound of vegetables. The expanding demand for beef is ecologically unsustainable, doubly so if people are burning down critical environments to create cow pasture.
This goes against so many basic principles of human dietary needs and sustainable agricultural practices.
The problems that frequently lead to the argument for cutting meat consumption for ecological reasons are all actually concerns with industrialized meat production practices, not with meat production itself. We don't need to cut meat production, we need to change how we raise, process, and distribute the meat. Raise thousands of cows in concrete pens in a remote area will always require too many inputs and produce too many unwanted outputs because it's not part of a larger ecosystem.
Ruminants like cows and sheep play a vital role in managing pasture and creating fertilizer. Chickens play a vital role in pest management and creating compost. Chickens and hogs both play a role in making productive use of waste products, eating food scraps and garden waste that would otherwise be lost.
Heck, we couldn't even have egg and milk production at all without producing meat or culling animals along the way. Only 50% of eggs hatched are female, we have to do something with the males. And dairy cows will only produce milk for 6-12 months after giving birth, meaning there are calves that need to play a part in the system as well.
That doesn't even get to the challenges of trying to raise crops without animal byproducts. Where does all the fertilizer come from?
The ever growing demand for meat is a leading cause of deforestation. Forests remove far more CO2 than grasslands (think 3 dimensions vs 2 dimensions).
Cows require orders of magnitude more land to be devoted to them than plant based food, simply due to the inefficiencies of the sunlight -> plant -> meat -> food production process. If you cut the middle-man out (meat), then the process becomes orders of magnitude more efficient.
This reminds me that if by "better farms with better practices" you mean free-range type farms, then they are actually far worse for the environment because they are less efficient. Eg, you need more land per pound of meat produced.
Cows also produce vast quantities of methane, which is a leading greenhouse gas. The quickest way to slow down global warming would be to cease livestock farming entirely.
You can plant something else in those fields that aren't feeding cows anymore.
Otherwise, there isn't enough grasslands to feed all the cattle that we're raising out there. And the calorie consumed by cows to calories consumed by humans ratio is somewhere like 7 to 1. If we didn't eat meat, we'd have a lot more food available on our hands, not to mention the drastically reduced methane production that threatens our climate as much as all transportation sources put together.
It's complicated. Some places in the world, livestock is grown quite sustainably and are basically neutral climate-wise. Other places, it is an unmitigated ecological disaster (clearing rain forest, for example). Because we produce so much around the world, on average, it is pretty bad.
Generally, livestock takes more land than grain crops in order to produce the same calories. However, there is more to nutrition than simple calories, so optimising for calories per hectare is probably not the right answer either. I once saw a report suggesting that you can feed more people with less total impact if you include livestock in the mix because livestock can graze on more marginal land than you can farm crops on. I am not qualified to comment on the veracity of that report.
I think, in the end, going vegan for climate change reasons is an extreme and unjustified position. On the other hand, almost everyone can stand to eat less meat than they currently do and would probably be healthier for it (myself, included). If we reduce overall meat consumption, it would definitely be a net win for climate and ecology reasons as we could concentrate on producing more sustainably on average than we currently do.
Meat is by far the production that require land. 1 cow requires 2.5 acres of land, if my memory is right.
If we cut meat consumption, then we have plenty of space available. We should eat much less meat in all cases, that's one of the few points that meta-analyses of effect of diet on health have pointed out.
We really need one piece of red meat like beef per week to get the vitamin B12. And no more than one meal with meat every other day.
Or we can have the same amount per week but with half portion everyday - for example if the dish requires meat for its taste.
With much fewer cows, we can then let them roam freely in forests, which they prefer by far. Grass without shade is good for golf, not for cows.
In the US, most cows don't even have grass ; they walk all day in their own shit, parked in overpopulated enclosure, and fed with soja.
That's so disgusting that cattle breeders went to court - and won - to forbid any photo of their enclosures.
I'm not a vegan, not even a vegetarian and I consider humans to be omnivorous by nature. But I want to eat the meat of happy cows, happy pigs and happy chicken.
Without hormones, without antibiotics, without GMOs feed. That means a more expensive meat but it tastes so much better, really.
Chicken are super tasty when raised in natural conditions. Pork is unbelievably better.
The planet is warming. Biodiversity is plumetting. By not eating meat we can have FOUR TIMES the food or keep the forests in place as REALLY NICE. Its not just the animals suffering. It will be many of us suffering as we burn the earth to fill our greedy bellies.
Funny you should say that, it's one of the core reasons many vegans and environmentalists advocate for avoiding meat altogether, as it disproportionately contributes to environmental impact. Turns out growing plants to feed to animals, and then growing those animals to feed to humans is less efficient than growing plants to feed to humans.
Greatly reducing meat production, particularly beef and other ruminants, will have a smaller effect than many people expect. Even if we don't eat them, vast numbers of ruminants will still need to exist because they are a critical part of natural ecosystems.
Humans made space for their preferred ruminants, like beef, by displacing vast populations of other ruminants which have similar climate impact. I don't think most people fully appreciate just how large the natural population was before we started raising beef at scale. Even if we eliminated the beef herds, other ruminant species would immediately start filling the vacuum.
As I understand, there are places where you can just put cows and they feed themselves off the land. But there is also a tremendous amount of deforestation happening because those lands are then used to grow food for cows that are in other locations.
I find it amazing how well avoiding eating meat aligns good things:
- less animal suffering
- less pollution of air, water, and land
- less waste (inefficient way to get calories)
- better health (assuming you substitute meat with vegetables and not highly-processed food)
This is true. Especially South American slash and burn of the rainforest for cattle grazing is a huge contribution. We're burning through our largest carbon sinks and also the most diverse ecosystem to raise meat. Switching to alternatives like lab-grown meat and vegetables would do more than anything to stop both climate change and species extinction. It's insane that we're dancing on the edge of the extermination of life on Earth because of flavor. I do think that it'a important to look at the other side though to understand why we're following these kinds of practices. There'a a lot of culture tied up with meat, and we won't be able to get past it unless we address the reasons for doing it on all levels.
I am not vegan and I don't understand why you brought them up. I am not even arguing for vegetarianism, if we all just replaced beef with pork that would be a huge improvement.
Most deforestation of the Amazon is done to create more land for cattle, to give you one example. It is by far the largest driver of tropical deforestation, and almost all global deforestation is tropical. Grazing land that can't support anything else is by definition not included in statistics on deforestation or loss of biomass and biodiversity.
It's true that a lot of cow feed is stuff humans won't eat, but it's not true that it would all be wasted if we stop raising cows. We can grow less of it, we can throw the scraps in anaerobic digesters to generate power, we can simply feed it to other animals, as a last resort we can use it for compost.
I'm pretty sure vegans are less than 1% of the world, and I don't think they have some special influence over the IPCC and most climate scientists on the planet.
Maybe because your meat consumption and demand for increasing land and water use to satiate your meat consumption is ruining the planet for the rest of us?
If I could trap all the "unrepentant meat eaters" in a dome and let you ruin your own environment without broiling the rest of us, I wouldn't have a problem with your choices.
- Trees are being cut down at record rate for meat production. Meat production is one of the bigger culprits in deforestation (and particularly of the Amazon and other tropical rainforests). If the world were willing to eat less meat (we don't have to be all-out vegan, we just need to eat much less of it) we'd be a lot better off in terms of how much arable land we need to feed everyone instead of feeding a bunch of cows and then feeding everyone
- The world population is much bigger now. All environmental problems are essentially only an issue because we have too many people in the world right now. If we had the population of the 1800's, none of our modern lifestyle habits would be a serious problem.
Because feeding meat to 9 billion is unsustainable and the only reason we are able to do it now is because of the huge subsidies. It has terrible environmental effects and it's morally wrong since the only reason people still eat meat is the taste and tradition. I expect a huge paradigm shift here. For more information you could watch documentaries like Cowspiracy and Earthlings.
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