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.

Soyboy

‘While many people are now aware of how the fossil fuel industry has deceived us, there’s less recognition of the even grimmer game played by the livestock industry.’ Photograph: FORGET Patrick/Alamy

From The Guardian

Everything that makes campaigning against fossil fuels difficult is 10 times harder when it comes to opposing livestock farming. Here you will find a similar suite of science denial, misinformation and greenwashing. But in this case, it’s accompanied by a toxic combination of identity politics, nostalgia, machismo and the demonisation of alternatives. If you engage with this issue, you don’t just need a thick skin; you need the skin of a glyptodon.

You will be vilified daily as a “soyboy”, a “hater of farmers” and a dictator who would force everyone to eat insects. You will be charged with undermining western civilisation, destroying its masculinity and threatening its health. You will be denounced as an enemy of Indigenous people, though generally not by Indigenous people themselves, for many of whom livestock farming is and has long been by far the greatest cause of land-grabbing, displacement and the destruction of their homes.

You will find yourself up against those who promote paleo diets (with or without added anabolic steroids), “agrarian localists” pushing impossible dreams of feeding 21st-century populations with medieval production systems, and culinary conservatism, which ranges, in different forms, from Donald Trump to MasterChef. You will find yourself fighting not only a very modern and peculiarly vicious demagoguery, but also a very old and deep-rooted romanticism, which still portrays the pastoral life much as the Greek poets and the Old Testament prophets did. There’s a powerful, de facto alliance between the two.

Perhaps most often, you’ll be denounced as a puppet of the World Economic Forum (a target of multiple conspiracy fictions), or a stooge of corporate or institutional power, in the pay of plant-based meat, precision fermentation, Big Lettuce or Big Bug, which are depicted as monstrous behemoths stamping on traditional businesses. As usual, it’s pure projection. Between 2015 and 2020, financial institutions invested $478bn (£380bn) in meat and dairy corporations. But from 2010 to 2020, only $5.9bn was invested in plant-based and other alternatives. Astonishingly, the livestock industry also receives, across the EU and US, about 1,000 times more government funding than alternative products. This includes massively more money for research and innovation, even though meat and dairy are well-established industries, while the alternatives are at the beginning of their innovation phase. Why? Because the livestock industry’s political connections are umbilical.

Tempting as it is to turn away, we simply cannot afford to ignore this sector. A remarkably wide and intense range of impacts – from global-scale habitat destruction to the mass slaughter of predators, river pollution, air pollution, dead zones at sea, antibiotic resistance and greenhouse gas emissions – reveal livestock farming, alongside fossil fuels, as one of the two most destructive industries on Earth.

The chances of a reasoned conversation across the divide are approximately zero. That’s not an accident. It’s a result of decades of the meat industry’s tobacco-style tactics and manufactured culture wars. Clever messaging triggers men who are obsessed by (and anxious about) their masculinity, generating paranoia over “feminisation” and a loss of dominance. The industry amplifies popular but false claims about livestock healing the land and drawing down more greenhouse gases than it produces. These efforts are reinforced by a tidal wave of disinformation from far-right influencers on social media. While many people have now become aware of how the fossil fuel industry has deceived us, there’s less recognition of the even grimmer game played by the livestock industry.

This came to a head at Cop28, which was meant to be the first climate summit at which the impacts of the food system were properly considered. But by the time 120 meat and dairy lobbyists had done their worst, nothing meaningful came of it.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) unveiled a report at the summit that was shocking even by that organisation’s notoriously pro-corporate standards. It greatly underplayed the impacts of the livestock industry and proposed nothing but a series of feeble technofixes to address it, including some that have been wildly overhyped, such as feeding seaweed to cows to limit the amount of methane they produce. I call this approach guillotine syndrome. There might be a slight improvement in efficiency, but it’s still decapitation.

Where was the discussion in this report about reducing livestock production or consumption? On the contrary, it proposed that, for nutritional reasons, the poor world should be eating more meat and dairy. It’s true that many of the world’s poor should have access to more protein and fat, but new approaches, such as microbial proteins, could deliver them to everyone without the import dependency, environmental disasters and health problems caused by switching to a western diet.

So where, in the FAO’s vision, would these extra livestock products come from? Hold on to your seats, because the answer is truly gobsmacking. As the Financial Times reports, the organisation’s chief economist, Maximo Torero, explained that “the way forward was for countries that are ‘very efficient in producing livestock’, such as the Netherlands and New Zealand, to produce more meat and dairy and then ship those products across the world”. Could he really be unaware that both these countries have been thrown into severe ecological and political crisis by the scale of their livestock industries? Yet now he wants them to produce even more – and for poorer nations to become dependent on these imports? Greetings to our visitor from Planet Meat.

The FAO, as the Guardian has documented, has a long and shameful history of suppressing awareness of livestock’s massive impacts. The scientists at the organisation who tried to raise the alarm about the environmental impacts of livestock production in 2006 and 2009 were vilified, censored and sabotaged by senior management. Following the report it published this week, I feel I can state with confidence that the FAO is a major cog in the meat misinformation machine.

The meat industry also nobbled the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Earlier this year, delegates from Brazil and Argentina – major meat exporters – managed to block its recommendation that we should shift towards plant-based diets.

Huge and powerful as these forces are, we need to be brave in confronting livestock production and the dark arts used to promote it. Those of us who do so don’t hate farmers, however much some of them might profess to hate us. We simply seek to apply the same standards to this industry as we’d apply to any other. But when we raise our hands in objection, they are met with fists raised in aggression. That’s the strategy, working as intended.

[George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist]

Denmark introduces a carbon tax on agriculture

Source : Vegconomist

 From Vegconomist

Denmark looks set to introduce what is claimed to be the world’s first carbon tax on agriculture, following negotiations between the government, farmer organisations, trade unions, industry, and environmental NGOs.

The agreement is expected to be formally approved by the Danish parliament in August, and will see a tax of DKK 300 per tonne CO2e introduced on livestock emissions from 2030. This will rise to DKK 750 per tonne CO2e in 2035, but with a basic deduction of 60%; this means that the effective tax will be DKK 120 (€16) per tonne in 2030 and DKK 300 (€40) per tonne in 2035.

“We are investing in the future of our agricultural sector”

The proceeds raised by the tax in 2030-31 will be returned to the industry as a support fund to aid the green transition. The tax is expected to reduce emissions by 1.8 million tonnes of CO2e by 2030, enabling Denmark to achieve its legally binding target of cutting emissions by 70%.

Additionally, 250,000 new hectares of forest will be established in the coming years, and targets have been set to protect at least 20% of nature. Fees for slaughterhouses will be raised by DKK 45 million (€6 million) annually from 2029, and funding will be allocated to upskill labour.

The agreement has been reached despite Europe-wide backlash from farmers against proposed EU environmental policies, which led to some targets being dropped earlier this year. New Zealand has also recently scrapped plans for a tax aimed at tackling livestock emissions.

With the new tax, Denmark continues on its trajectory of progressive agricultural policies. In 2021, the country allocated 580 million DKK to farmers who produce plant-based foods; this was said to be the first time in history that plant foods had been given priority in an agricultural agreement.

In October 2023, Denmark became the first country worldwide to publish a national action plan for plant-based foods. The plan aims to strengthen and promote the country’s plant-based sector as part of the shift toward climate-friendly diets. Its publication came just a few months after a report found that Denmark’s financial sector currently lacks the objectives, knowledge, and ambition to invest in sustainable foods.

In March of last year, the Danish Climate Council recommended that two-thirds of the meat consumed by Danes should be replaced by plant-based foods, and suggested that high-emission foods such as beef should be taxed.

Beef and mutton produce the most methane in agriculture, and methane is 80 times as potent a greenhouse gas over 10 years as CO2 (it takes 12 years for methane to decay into CO2).  Also, expanding beef production means more land clearing, though obviously not in Denmark.  Globally, these two factors make agriculture a major source of greenhouse gases.  In 2024, 88% of Denmark's electricity came from renewables.   And 56% of Denmark's car sales are EVs/PHEVs.   Agriculture is the logical next step to cut emissions.  Heat pumps are another.  Compared to the rest of Scandinavia and Europe, Denmark has fewer heat pumps installed per 100,000 people, partly because its heat pump subsidies are smaller.  Heat pumps are far more efficient for heating in terms of energy use than old-fashioned gas or oil boilers.