Animal Agriculture Is Eating the Earth

Source: The rise of plant-based diets

From Herbivore Club

Humanity uses half of the planet’s habitable land for agriculture. Most of that land is not used to grow food for humans. It is used to graze animals or grow crops to feed them. We flatten forests, drain wetlands, degrade peatlands, and cover entire regions with monocultures. Then we feed much of what we grow to animals, kill the animals and call this an efficient food system. It is an ecological disaster held together by subsidies, political cowardice and the refusal to question humanity’s assumed entitlement to use other animals.

A major study published in Nature has modelled what could happen if the world moved towards healthier, more plant-rich diets by 2050, while improving agricultural productivity and halving food waste. The results are enormous.

Compared with continuing along the current path, agriculture-related carbon dioxide emissions from land-use change could fall by 76%. Compared with 2020, they could fall by 85%. Direct methane and nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture could fall by around a third.

Global agricultural land use would shrink. Hundreds of millions fewer cows, sheep and goats would be used for food. Tens of billions fewer chickens and pigs would be bred and killed than under business as usual.

This is not a model of global veganism. It does not propose ending the use of animals. It merely limits the consumption of animal flesh, dairy and eggs while increasing the production of vegetables, fruit, nuts and legumes. Even that would radically reshape the planet.

Feeding Humans Instead of other Animals

The study compared business as usual with a transformation built around three changes: healthier diets, improved agricultural productivity and a 50% reduction in food loss and waste. Under business as usual, animal numbers continue rising. More land is cultivated. More fertiliser is used. More greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere.

Under the transformation scenario, animal agriculture contracts and a greater share of crops goes directly to humans instead of being diverted into animal feed.

Animals are not machines capable of converting every calorie they consume into food for humans. They use energy to breathe, move, maintain their bodies and stay alive. Much of the nutritional value in animal feed never reaches a human plate. Growing crops to feed animals so humans can eat their bodies adds an unnecessary and wasteful stage to the food system.

The study found that agricultural production would be 17% lower than under business as usual, largely because less animal feed and fewer animal products would be produced. But the overall value of agricultural production would remain roughly comparable with 2020. In other words, humanity could feed a larger population without endlessly expanding agriculture. We could simply stop wasting so much land and food on animals.

The Industry That Would Shrink

The economic value of animal agriculture would fall by 60% compared with business as usual, dropping from a projected $2.2 trillion to $870 billion. The industry will present this as a threat. It is a threat. To them.

For the climate, wildlife, forests, rivers and animals imprisoned on farms, it is an opportunity.

The value of vegetable, fruit, nut and legume production would increase by 23%. Their share of agricultural output would rise from 34% under business as usual to 58% in the transformed system. This is not the destruction of farming. It is a transition from using vast amounts of land to breed and feed animals towards growing food for humans.

Some rural economies have been built around animal agriculture, and workers should not be abandoned. Governments have spent decades paying farmers to maintain destructive systems. They can pay them to leave those systems. Public money could support farmers to grow legumes, vegetables, fruit, nuts and grains for direct human consumption. It could fund habitat restoration, peatland recovery, woodland expansion and new plant-based industries.

The choice is not between preserving every existing animal farm and condemning rural communities to poverty. The choice is whether governments manage the transition fairly or continue delaying until ecological collapse forces a much more brutal one.

Soya Is Not the Problem

Nowhere is the waste of feeding crops to animals clearer than in Brazil. Soya cultivation has expanded across the Amazon and Cerrado, covering more than half of Brazil’s arable land. Nearly 80% of soya beans are used to feed animals in agriculture and aquaculture. This expansion is commonly blamed on vegans eating tofu. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of soya is not eaten directly by humans. It is fed to cows, pigs, chickens and farmed fish. Demand for animal flesh drives demand for animal feed. Even when soya is planted on land previously cleared for cattle grazing, it can still push destruction deeper into the forest. Mechanised crop farms take over pasture, cattle ranching moves into previously untouched areas and land prices rise in anticipation of future deforestation.

The damage does not end at the edge of the plantation.

Expanding soya production creates pressure for more roads, railways, ports, storage facilities and dredged rivers. Nearly 95% of Amazon deforestation in Brazil occurs within three miles of highways. Every mile of major road can generate many more miles of secondary roads, spreading forest clearance and degradation even further.

Communities become surrounded by plantations. Residents report tasting clouds of pesticides, followed by tingling skin, dizziness and difficulty breathing. This is what the alleged efficiency of animal agriculture looks like from the ground.

Forests are not being destroyed because humanity lacks enough farmland. Brazil already has vast areas of previously deforested land. Forests are destroyed because an expanding industry demands more land, more feed and more infrastructure.

Britain Pays for Destruction

The same basic failure can be seen in Britain’s uplands.

On Dartmoor, only 0.1% of surveyed protected land was found to be in an ecologically favourable condition. Blanket bogs and heathlands have been damaged by drainage, peat extraction, burning and grazing.

Sheep continue eating the remaining vegetation and preventing habitats from recovering. This activity is not even economically viable on its own. Each ewe grazed on the Dartmoor commons reportedly loses the farmer £16.90.

The public pays to keep it going.

More than £32 million was paid to Dartmoor commoners through environmental stewardship schemes over a decade. Not one common improved. Many became worse. This land also makes a minimal contribution to food production. Dartmoor is within the least productive 20% of English farmland, which produces less than 3% of England’s food. We are subsidising a loss-making industry to damage protected habitats while pretending this is necessary for food security.

It is difficult to design a more absurd system.

Restored blanket bogs could store carbon, reduce flooding and support wildlife. Instead, taxpayers fund sheep grazing that degrades them.

Animal agriculture is defended as an essential use of the countryside even when it produces little food, loses money and destroys the very landscape the public is supposedly paying to protect.

The Largest Land Recovery in 2,000 Years

Under the transformation model, agricultural land could contract by 274 million hectares by 2050.

The researchers describe this as the largest absolute reduction in agricultural land in more than 2,000 years. Grazing land would fall by 10% compared with 2020. Some cropland would expand to produce more fruit, vegetables, nuts and legumes, but total agricultural land would still shrink.

There would be more than 400 million fewer cows, sheep and goats used for flesh than in 2020, and 800 million fewer than under business as usual. There would also be 32 billion fewer pigs and chickens than under business as usual. Every number represents living individuals who would not be bred into confinement and slaughter. Fewer animals means fewer forests cleared for feed. Less grazing pressure. Lower methane emissions. Less manure. Less fertiliser. Less water consumed by a system designed to turn plants into animal products.

It also means less suffering.

The environmental argument and the animal rights argument are not competing concerns. They point towards the same conclusion because the same industry is responsible for both forms of destruction.

Business as Usual Is the Expensive Option

Defenders of animal agriculture often frame transition as a reckless experiment. Business as usual is the experiment.

It asks whether humanity can continue expanding an inefficient food system on a finite planet while temperatures rise, habitats collapse and billions of animals are bred into lives of exploitation.

The current food system already produces around a third of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions by conservative calculations. It is helping push the planet beyond multiple ecological boundaries. A third of food is lost or wasted. Poor diets contribute to millions of premature deaths.

Governments continue subsidise animal agriculture, build infrastructure around it and protect it from meaningful change. The Nature study warns that powerful industries are likely to resist, block or co-opt transformation. Of course they will. A system worth trillions will not dismantle itself because the evidence says it should. It will demand weaker targets, longer deadlines, more public money and technological distractions that allow animal numbers to remain high. It will promise lower-emission cows, more efficient feed and marginally less destructive farms.

Anything except fewer animals.

But fewer animals are the central reason this model produces such enormous gains. The future food system does not require more efficient exploitation. It requires a drastic reduction in the number of animals bred, confined and killed. Even a cautious, “flexitarian” model could cut land-use emissions by 76%, release vast areas of land and prevent tens of billions of animals from entering the farming system.

Imagine what we could achieve if we stopped treating animal exploitation as an unavoidable part of food production.

The problem is not that humanity cannot feed everyone.

The problem is that we are feeding the planet to animals.

The two biggest single things you can do to reduce emissions is to become vegetarian, with plant-based milk, and replace your petrol car with an EV.   A third of emissions come from agriculture (land clearing plus methane).  And 20% come from land transport.  Optimistically, you could therefore cut your personal contribution to global emissions by 50%.   We face climate catastrophe.  You can do something to stop it.

Deforestation is 3rd largest source of emissions

Vegetarian/vegan food is much less environmentally damaging than meat.

From Elena Sgarbossa

A vegan burger uses less than 10% land in its production than production of a beef burger does.

Which means that less forest is cleared.  And if tropical deforestation was a country, its emissions would be behind only China and the USA.  

Moreover, to the emissions produced by land clearing, you have to add in the methane directly produced by beef and mutton.  The rise in atmospheric methane is responsible for 1/3rd of the rise in global temperatures since 1850-1900.  The biggest step you can take to personally help cut emissions and global temperatures is to give up meat and milk.

Who's really destroying the rainforest?

 From Vegan Horizon

We’ve all heard it: “Vegans are destroying the rainforest!” This claim uses one true fact — that soy farming contributes to deforestation — to mask a far larger, more inconvenient truth.

It’s time to set the record straight on meat, soy, and rainforest destruction once and for all.

Yes, deforestation is a massive and growing problem — an existential threat not just to wildlife, but to humanity itself.

But that’s not an argument against going plant-based. It’s a powerful argument for it.

Here’s why 👇

It’s easy to think that vegans are behind most of the world’s soy consumption. But in reality, just 7% of global soy production goes into foods like tofu, tempeh, soy sauce, miso, edamame, or soy milk.

Meanwhile, over three-quarters (about 77%) of the world’s soy production is used to feed farmed animals.

That means animal products consume ten times more soy than vegan foods.

It’s also worth noting that only a tiny fraction of soy-based foods is actually consumed by vegans, since just 1–2% of the global population is vegan (yet). In many countries, including parts of Asia and increasingly in the West, non-vegans also consume soy products — plant-based milks alone are now found in up to 44% of U.S. households. This makes the share of global soy consumed by vegans even smaller.

Animals are a highly inefficient food source because they consume far more feed, water, and energy than the calories they ultimately provide. Producing a given amount of calories from chicken requires about 10 times more feed calories — and producing beef requires around 33 times more.

This is logical because — unlike plants — animals expend energy not only on growth and reproduction but also on movement, maintaining body temperature, and other energy-intensive biological processes.

And these inefficiencies have a major impact on global soy trade. Most countries that currently rely on imports could easily meet their demand for direct human consumption from local sources. It is the enormous quantities required for animal feed production that make soy imports necessary in the first place.

Let’s remember what this is all about: the claim that vegan soy products are destroying the rainforest.

We’ve already busted this claim — but that was just the tip of the iceberg:

Beyond the soy used to feed farmed animals, the animal industry clears vast swathes of rainforest for pasture — a far greater driver of deforestation than soy farming.

Overall, animal farming causes five times more deforestation than any other industry, and is responsible for 80% of deforestation across the Amazon. It’s the number one culprit of deforestation in virtually every Amazon country.

Key Takeaways

• Blaming vegans for rainforest destruction flips the truth on its head — it shields the real culprit and attacks one of the most effective solutions.

• Animal agriculture is — by a wide margin — the world’s leading driver of deforestation and rainforest destruction.

• Living plant-based is one of the most powerful ways individuals can shrink their environmental footprint. Research shows that a plant-based food system is the only option to reliably feed a growing population without further deforestation.

2 million hectares of Queensland forest destroyed

 From The Guardian

More than 2m hectares (4.94m acres) of bushland in Queensland that included large swathes of possible koala habitat has been cleared over a five-year period, new analysis shows.

The research, commissioned by Greenpeace and conducted by the University of Queensland academic Martin Taylor, found almost all land clearing that occurred in the state between 2016 and 2021 was in areas where threatened species habitat was “likely to occur”.

Almost two-thirds of the cleared area, or 1.3m hectares, was marked by the Queensland government as “category x”, meaning it was exempt from state vegetation laws that regulate land clearing. Some 500,000 hectares of that land was koala habitat, the report said.

Taylor, an adjunct professor at the University of Queensland and former WWF-Australia conservation scientist, conducted the analysis by comparing state government land clearing data to federally mapped areas of environmental significance.

The majority of recorded land clearing occurred in regrowth forest that was more than 15 years old, which Taylor said made it capable of providing rich habitat for native animals.

“Industry voices like to say this is just controlling knee-high regrowth, so it’s just vegetation management,” he said. “[But] a 15-year-old eucalypt forest can be at least 10 to 15 metres high – they are forests.”

Taylor said that while laws in Queensland allow for regrowth forests to be reclassified as remnant once they mature, the requirements to do so are unclear.

“A lot of regrowth 15 years and older could have already become what they define as remnant, making it more difficult to clear,” he said.

Gemma Plesman, a senior campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said the report documented deforestation on a “frightening” scale. She said the state’s annual statewide land cover and tree study (Slats) shows land clearing was driven by beef production.

According to the beef industry, more than 10m cattle graze on Queensland pastures, making it the biggest beef producing state in the country.

“Fast food chains and retailers should be aware that the beef they are selling could come from properties that have bulldozed koala habitat with no government oversight,” Plesman said.

Plesman said environmental law reforms being developed by the federal government needed to address concerns around deforestation in Queensland to be effective.

“This shocking data should be a wake-up call,” she said. “They must address what has made Australia a global hotspot for deforestation.”

The Wilderness Society Queensland campaign manager, Hannah Schuch, said deforestation in Queensland was driving biodiversity loss.

“It’s having an impact on iconic native species like the koala, the greater glider, the red goshawk, it’s tearing down their homes and pushing them towards extinction,” she said.

“We know that erosion and sediment runoff from deforestation is another threat to the already at-risk Great Barrier Reef,” she said.

A spokesperson for the federal environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, said the government was in the consultation process to develop new national environment laws. However, three organisations familiar with the draft laws say they would continue to allow widespread deforestation.

Michael Guerin, the chief executive of Queensland farming body AgForce, questioned the accuracy of the Slats data which was used in Taylor’s analysis. He said deforestation rates were overstated. [Of course he did]

He suggested there should be an on-the-ground survey to confirm deforestation rates. [which is much more expensive and not necessarily more accurate. In fact aerial surveys often miss small areas of clearing, meaning the real total could be higher.]

“Let’s come out and ground truth it,” Guerin said. “Let’s get out on the landscape and spend the money and time so we’re confident about what’s happening. The industry and community is up for that.” [yeah, right]

Australia's "decline" in emissions is solely due to LULUCF (Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry)    There have already been questions and accusations that the data are dodgy.  One claim is that partially cleared land is not picked up by the satellites; only fully cleared land is.  This latest analysis simply adds to the evidence.  

Oh, and I beg you: stop eating beef.  

Drivers of deforestation

From Our World in Data

Every year the world loses around 5 million hectares of forest. 95% of this occurs in the tropics. At least three-quarters of this is driven by agriculture – clearing forests to grow crops, raise livestock and produce products such as paper.1

If we want to tackle deforestation we need to understand two key questions: where we’re losing forests, and what activities are driving it. This allows us to target our efforts towards specific industries, products, or countries where they will have the greatest impact.

In a study published in Global Environmental Change, Florence Pendrill and colleagues addressed both of these questions.2 They quantified how much and where deforestation occurs from the expansion of croplands, pasture and tree plantations (for logging), and what products are grown on this converted land. They also combined this with global trade flows to assess how much of this deforestation was driven by international trade – we look at the role of trade specifically in a related article.

Here we’ll look at both where tropical deforestation is happening and what products are driving it.

Brazil and Indonesia account for almost half of tropical deforestation

The study by Pendrill et al. (2019) found that, between 2005 and 2013, the tropics lost an average of 5.5 million hectares of forest per year to agricultural land. That was a decade ago, but the world is still losing a similar amount today: using satellite data, researchers at Global Forest Watch estimate that global deforestation in 2019 was around 5.4 million hectares.3 95% of this was in the tropics. But where in the tropics did we lose this forest?

In the chart we see the share of tropical deforestation by country and region. It’s measured as the annual average between 2010 and 2014.

One-third of tropical deforestation happened in Brazil. That was 1.7 million hectares each year. The other single country where large forest areas are lost is Indonesia – it accounted for 14%. This means around half (47%) of tropical deforestation took place in Brazil and Indonesia. Again, if we look at more recent satellite data we find that this is still true today: in 2019, the world lost 5.4 million hectares to deforestation, with Brazil and Indonesia accounting for 52% of it.4 As we will see later, the expansion of pasture for beef production, croplands for soy and palm oil, and increasingly conversion of primary forest to tree plantations for paper and pulp have been the key drivers of this.

The expansion of pasture lands have also had a major impact on land use in the rest of the Americas – outside of Brazil, Latin America accounted for around one-fifth of deforestation.

The expansion of agricultural land in Africa accounted for around 17.5% of deforestation. This may slightly underestimate the loss of forests in Africa, for two reasons. Much of Africa’s deforestation has been driven by subsistence agricultural activities, which are not always fully captured in national statistics. Secondly, depending on the permanence of agricultural activities such as slash-and-burn farming, some of this forest loss might be classified as temporary forest degradation rather than permanent deforestation.

Beef, soy and palm oil are responsible for 60% of tropical deforestation

If we want to tackle deforestation we also need to know what causes it. That allows us to avoid the foods that drive deforestation or innovate the ways we produce them.

In the chart here we see the breakdown of tropical deforestation by the types of agricultural production.

Beef stands out immediately. The expansion of pasture land to raise cattle was responsible for 41% of tropical deforestation. That’s 2.1 million hectares every year – about half the size of the Netherlands. Most of this converted land came from Brazil; its expansion of beef production accounts for one-quarter (24%) of tropical deforestation. This also means that most (72%) deforestation in Brazil is driven by cattle ranching.5 Cattle in other parts of Latin America – such as Argentina and Paraguay – also accounted for a large amount of deforestation – 11% of the total. Most deforestation for beef therefore occurs in Latin America, with another 4% happening in Africa.

Palm oil and soy often claim the headlines for their environmental impact. They are categorised as ‘oilseeds’, which also include a range of smaller commodities such as sunflower, rapeseed, and sesame. They drove 18% of deforestation. Here we see that Indonesian palm oil was the biggest component of this. In neighbouring Malaysia the expansion of oil seeds was also a major driver of forest loss. Soybeans are the most common oilseed in Latin America. While many people immediately think of food products such as tofu or soy milk, most of global soybean production is used as feed for livestock, or biofuels. Just 6% is used for direct human food. The impact of soy production is one we look at in more detail in a related article.

Combined, beef and oilseeds account for nearly 60% of deforestation.

If we add the third largest driver – forestry products, which is dominated by paper but also includes timber – then we cover almost three-quarters. Across Europe and North America, forestry products mainly come from managed plantation forests that have been established for a long period of time, or are grown on previously unforested land. This is different from most tropical countries where forestry products also come from the logging of primary rainforests or their replacement with plantations. This destroys primary rainforests and, as shown in the chart, has been an important driver of deforestation in Indonesia and elsewhere in Asia.

We can tackle a lot of deforestation by focusing on a few key supply chains

If almost three-quarters of tropical deforestation is driven by the production of a few key products – beef, soybeans, palm oil, and paper – then we can achieve a lot by focusing our efforts on these supply chains.

There are some signs that progress is possible. Soybean production in Brazil was once also an important driver of deforestation in the Amazon region.6 In 2006, under pressure from retailers and NGOs, the world’s major soybean traders signed Brazil’s Soy Moratorium (SoyM) – the world’s first voluntary zero-deforestation agreement. Traders agreed that they would not purchase soy that was grown on deforested lands in the Brazilian Amazon after July 2006. Overall, it was a success: in the two years before the agreement, 30% of soybean expansion in the region came at the expense of forest; afterwards, deforestation declined dramatically and by 2014 only 1% of expansion was turning forests into land for oilseed production.7,8

But, as we show in our article on the impact of soy, there are also lessons to learn about how to implement these commitments more effectively. There is evidence that while the moratorium reduced deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon, some of this deforestation may have ‘leaked’ to neighbouring regions. Soybean production has shifted from the Amazon to the Cerrado region south of the Amazonas, often at the expense of forests there.9 This suggests that zero-deforestation agreements can be effective but must be considered in the wider context of how they shape forest and agricultural changes elsewhere. To combat this, researchers have suggested the SoyM be expanded to not only include the Amazon but also regions such as the Cerrado.10

If we can take similar action in the other industries – beef, palm oil and paper – then there is the potential to cut out a large share of deforestation today.

Looking to the future, a shift in focus towards Sub-Saharan Africa looks likely. The demands for increased agricultural production in Africa are going to be large, and could come at the cost of forests.11 Solutions there will have to focus on major improvements in crop yields so African farmers can produce more food without increasing the amount of land they need to do so.

Alternative ways of making high-quality protein could also be transformative. Beef is the leading driver of deforestation, and the demand for meat across the world will continue to grow in the coming decades. Technological innovations in meat substitute and cultured meat products would allow people to continue eating meat-like products without the destruction of tropical forests that come with it.

One of the biggest steps you personally can take to reduce emissions and avert climate catastrophe is to stop eating beef and drinking milk.