Impact of a plant-based diet-Large scale monocropping

David3, I have been digging more into the issue of area under grain crops for feed specifically and it is not an easy one to answer. Grains are first and foremost grown for human consumption. But yes, a lot goes to animal feed, especially corn. However, there are varied factors, many of which are economic - current prices, current growing conditions, yield quality and quantity. It seems hard to come to a firm conclusion as I have seen numbers from about 40% of all cereal grains globally to as much as 70%. I think 30% is still a fair factor but this should also be applied to the area under wheat as well as quite a lot of wheat goes to feed (eg about 70% of domestic use here in Australia). Still, that remains a really rubbery guess. I will recalculate with this adjustment and see what I get.
 
David3, I have been digging more into the issue of area under grain crops for feed specifically and it is not an easy one to answer. Grains are first and foremost grown for human consumption. But yes, a lot goes to animal feed, especially corn. However, there are varied factors, many of which are economic - current prices, current growing conditions, yield quality and quantity. It seems hard to come to a firm conclusion as I have seen numbers from about 40% of all cereal grains globally to as much as 70%. I think 30% is still a fair factor but this should also be applied to the area under wheat as well as quite a lot of wheat goes to feed (eg about 70% of domestic use here in Australia). Still, that remains a really rubbery guess. I will recalculate with this adjustment and see what I get.
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Please post weblinks to your data sources.
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David3, well, probably not because I have spent a lot of time looking at many papers and sites and can't be bothered trying to find them all again. I might try to offer a few examples later. This recent FAO report however does make a salient point - that much of the crops that go to feed are not of human consumption quality. In other words, when growers sit down to grow a crop or to sell it, much depends on conditions. Most of the time they'd aim to sell into human supply chains due to better margins but frequently cannot. Similarly, a lot of the feed is a residue from human processing. It seems unclear how much of the grains are grown specifically for feed, but I don't think it is much as many people seem to think (ie, what proportion is sewn just to sell to feed). More Fuel for the Food/Feed Debate
 
David3, well, probably not because I have spent a lot of time looking at many papers and sites and can't be bothered trying to find them all again. I might try to offer a few examples later. This recent FAO report however does make a salient point - that much of the crops that go to feed are not of human consumption quality. In other words, when growers sit down to grow a crop or to sell it, much depends on conditions. Most of the time they'd aim to sell into human supply chains due to better margins but frequently cannot. Similarly, a lot of the feed is a residue from human processing. It seems unclear how much of the grains are grown specifically for feed, but I don't think it is much as many people seem to think (ie, what proportion is sewn just to sell to feed). More Fuel for the Food/Feed Debate
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Without links to your source data, it's impossible to verify your calculations.
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Generally speaking I don't think there is enough info to draw any strong conclusion. But as I said I will try to offer a few examples a little ter when I have time to dig through my history.
 
I am not sure I see the relevance of your points, fakei. No, there is no protein in vegetable oil. What does that have to do with this analysis? Low fat diets of any kind presumably use little vegetable oil, but again what is the relevance? As for over-consumption of protein, my calculations use the RDI for protein. If we factor in some sort of discretionary over-consumption, the results may well be different, but I suspect not by much. The analysis is only about large-scale monocropping, not pasture land. Land clearing to grow these crops is the same problem under either scenario, because the demand for plants is the cause.
Weren't you looking for the missing protein and at the same time dismissing the soy used for cattle as irrelevant because the oil in it is for human consumption? Wouldn't that protein be going for humans?

There is also the matter of all the other natural resources that would be liberated like water, fuels, etc... and how the changes in these variable affect the whole.

Honestly at this stage it is difficult not to believe that giving up meat is good for everything.

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Land Use
 
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Fakei, my analysis is really only aimed at one issue - the question of whether or not vegan/plant-based diets contribute to or cause extensive monoculture cropping. On nearly every farming page I visit, this is the standard view. They all think that plant-based diets cause monoculture cropping at large-scales and it can only be worse in a "vegan" world. What I was curious about is how much this is true. At my first cut, it came out that overall, there probably wouldn't be much difference, largely because an awful lot of these crops are grown primarily for human use, uses that most likely would remain in a "vegan" world (I put vegan in quotes because I really mean plant-based, but many people interchange the terms).

I need to look at numbers a little more because it seems there might be more grains used for feed than I thought, but I don't think it will change the numbers greatly. Of course, in my analysis I assumed that in the vegan world, people would only eat as much protein/calories as they need. That is probably not true - I think people would still over-consume just as much.

So, what I tried to do was work out how much land is currently used for those crops - cereals, coarse grains and oil crops. Then, worked out what this would reduce by were there no animals (ie, no demand for feed) and offset that by whatever would be need to be grown to make up for that loss of food. It turns out we'd reduce land under crops by somewhere around 200-300 million hectares by eliminating animal feed, but require around 130-200 million hectares. On my numbers, it tends to sit around the 60-70 million hectares better off, or overall about a 4-5% reduction, which, let's face it, is negligible.

Note I am not trying to replace all meat, seafood and dairy with plants but rather only the amount of protein that needs to be made up on an average global level. Globally people get about 57% of protein from plants and 43% from animals. So I used that 43% as the value that needs to be made up. That value would be far higher if I tried to replace all the animal foods actually consumed.

Anyways, the point is that the current problem of monoculture cropping is first and foremost due to everyday demand, not to plant-based diets, and secondly that eliminating animals, while it would bring with it many other benefits, would probably not make that much of a dent in the total area under crops.
 
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Many info online that you see advocating for meat production in the internet, or trying to make studies look favourable to the meat industry, looks highly misleading. Usually the opening info doesn't fit with the development. Also because a huge amount of land is required to produce meat, a very small amount of that land is a lot to produce grains.
 
Fakei, my analysis is really only aimed at one issue - the question of whether or not vegan/plant-based diets contribute to or cause extensive monoculture cropping. On nearly every farming page I visit, this is the standard view. They all think that plant-based diets cause monoculture cropping at large-scales and it can only be worse in a "vegan" world. What I was curious about is how much this is true. At my first cut, it came out that overall, there probably wouldn't be much difference, largely because an awful lot of these crops are grown primarily for human use, uses that most likely would remain in a "vegan" world (I put vegan in quotes because I really mean plant-based, but many people interchange the terms).

I need to look at numbers a little more because it seems there might be more grains used for feed than I thought, but I don't think it will change the numbers greatly. Of course, in my analysis I assumed that in the vegan world, people would only eat as much protein/calories as they need. That is probably not true - I think people would still over-consume just as much.

So, what I tried to do was work out how much land is currently used for those crops - cereals, coarse grains and oil crops. Then, worked out what this would reduce by were there no animals (ie, no demand for feed) and offset that by whatever would be need to be grown to make up for that loss of food. It turns out we'd reduce land under crops by somewhere around 200-300 million hectares by eliminating animal feed, but require around 130-200 million hectares. On my numbers, it tends to sit around the 60-70 million hectares better off, or overall about a 4-5% reduction, which, let's face it, is negligible.

Note I am not trying to replace all meat, seafood and dairy with plants but rather only the amount of protein that needs to be made up on an average global level. Globally people get about 57% of protein from plants and 43% from animals. So I used that 43% as the value that needs to be made up. That value would be far higher if I tried to replace all the animal foods actually consumed.

Anyways, the point is that the current problem of monoculture cropping is first and foremost due to everyday demand, not to plant-based diets, and secondly that eliminating animals, while it would bring with it many other benefits, would probably not make that much of a dent in the total area under crops.

Fakei, my analysis is really only aimed at one issue - the question of whether or not vegan/plant-based diets contribute to or cause extensive monoculture cropping. On nearly every farming page I visit, this is the standard view. They all think that plant-based diets cause monoculture cropping at large-scales and it can only be worse in a "vegan" world. What I was curious about is how much this is true. At my first cut, it came out that overall, there probably wouldn't be much difference, largely because an awful lot of these crops are grown primarily for human use, uses that most likely would remain in a "vegan" world (I put vegan in quotes because I really mean plant-based, but many people interchange the terms).

I need to look at numbers a little more because it seems there might be more grains used for feed than I thought, but I don't think it will change the numbers greatly. Of course, in my analysis I assumed that in the vegan world, people would only eat as much protein/calories as they need. That is probably not true - I think people would still over-consume just as much.

So, what I tried to do was work out how much land is currently used for those crops - cereals, coarse grains and oil crops. Then, worked out what this would reduce by were there no animals (ie, no demand for feed) and offset that by whatever would be need to be grown to make up for that loss of food. It turns out we'd reduce land under crops by somewhere around 200-300 million hectares by eliminating animal feed, but require around 130-200 million hectares. On my numbers, it tends to sit around the 60-70 million hectares better off, or overall about a 4-5% reduction, which, let's face it, is negligible.

Note I am not trying to replace all meat, seafood and dairy with plants but rather only the amount of protein that needs to be made up on an average global level. Globally people get about 57% of protein from plants and 43% from animals. So I used that 43% as the value that needs to be made up. That value would be far higher if I tried to replace all the animal foods actually consumed.

Anyways, the point is that the current problem of monoculture cropping is first and foremost due to everyday demand, not to plant-based diets, and secondly that eliminating animals, while it would bring with it many other benefits, would probably not make that much of a dent in the total area under crops.
Regarding protein consumption, it may depend on whether people are over-consuming protein deliberately or if it just part of their eating habits. And most people don't seem to keep a track of it but rather to aim at satiety. There were at least some studies in the past that said vegans consume in average less protein.

My comments were defensive but actually the results you came to, if I'm understanding correctly, are quite positive. That means in theory it would be possible to replace meat for crops, without changing the amount of crops, while delivering the planet from the entire burden of meat production.
 
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Fakei, yes, I think the findings, even if only indicative, suggest a positive state of affairs. First, that the problem of land under such crops is primarily a result of the non-vegan population and secondly that were there to be a plant-based world with no more animal foods, the likely result would be much the same as now or even less land under crops. One paper I looked at suggested that there is enough food grown now that if that grown for feed were repurposed towards human food it would be sufficient for a population of as many as 9 billion people.
 
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A huge 2018 study at the University of Oxford based on 40,000 farms in 119 countries found that “A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use,” as said by the leader of the research, Joseph Poore.

They found that the livestock sector produces only 18% of calories but takes up 83% of farmland. What an insanely inefficient use of resources and land!

Now to claim that vegan diets “also kill animals or insects” or that eating crops causes deforestation, is simply not a well thought out argument as the vast majority of crop land is used to feed the animals that people use for food.

According to the Oxford study we could reduce global farmland by more than 75% by adopting a vegan lifestyle, which would in turn, reduce all other negative consequences of plant farming including; crop deaths, deforestation, pesticide use etc.

There are also much better ways to farm plant foods which include; indoor vertical farming and veganic farming, which can greatly reduce overall harm. Conversely there is NO ethical or humane way to exploit and murder animals for their flesh and bi-products.

So, instead of trying to find silly arguments to exploit and kill animals like “Vegans kill animals too!” Why don’t you actually help us work towards the most practical worldwide solution to minimising animal and environmental harm, which is quite obviously, a vegan world.
 
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Half the soy cattle feed imported by the UK to feed farm cattle is grown in Brazil Amazon defrosted land...80 percent of deforestation is for growing farm agriculture feed.
Wild life habitats destroyed...species extinctions continue in the 6th mass extinction...only 4 percent if animals are now wild life...36 percent humans...and 60 percent farm animals

Take that very factual matter....that 60 percent of all animals on this planet are human created farm animals....and it is obvious...feeding them uses the mass of the resources of the planet.
 
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Vegan Dogs, I don't entirely agree with this argument. While livestock may take up "X% of farmland", much of this is rangelands or other marginal grasslands on which crops cannot be grown. Yes, there is much land clearing going on for agriculture, particularly for livestock grazing and eliminating animal farming might help reduce this, but in terms of area under crops the question is, how much difference would it make to grow all the extra crops needed to feed humans a plant-based diet. As best I can tell, the answer is that a plant-based diet is better in terms of total area under crops, but it isn't as much as you'd think. In fact, depending on whise numbers you believe, it is probably somewhere between 5% and 15%. Not an amazing improvement. To say that livestock only contribute 18% of calories but use up 85% of farmland is somewhat misleading (I am assuming that by "livestock sector" they mean grazed livestock, not all animals used for food).
 
Vegan Dogs, I don't entirely agree with this argument. While livestock may take up "X% of farmland", much of this is rangelands or other marginal grasslands on which crops cannot be grown. Yes, there is much land clearing going on for agriculture, particularly for livestock grazing and eliminating animal farming might help reduce this, but in terms of area under crops the question is, how much difference would it make to grow all the extra crops needed to feed humans a plant-based diet. As best I can tell, the answer is that a plant-based diet is better in terms of total area under crops, but it isn't as much as you'd think. In fact, depending on whise numbers you believe, it is probably somewhere between 5% and 15%. Not an amazing improvement. To say that livestock only contribute 18% of calories but use up 85% of farmland is somewhat misleading (I am assuming that by "livestock sector" they mean grazed livestock, not all animals used for food).
The thing is, a small area for grazing is a huge area for crops, even if there is a little arable land being used for grazing it could be a huge land for crops. There is also the matter of how much of that land could be used to grow trees that give nuts and fruits usually more consumed in a vegan diet.

Since Brazil has been mentioned, remember reading some years back that they were able to convert land that was not suited for crops into suitable. Because I understand zero of the issue don't know if it is possible to say they converted non-arable land into arable.

They also genetically modified the soy to grow in their climate.

However this issue is a very complex one and like above said it is zero knowledge from this side.

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A huge 2018 study at the University of Oxford based on 40,000 farms in 119 countries found that “A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use,” as said by the leader of the research, Joseph Poore.

They found that the livestock sector produces only 18% of calories but takes up 83% of farmland. What an insanely inefficient use of resources and land!

Now to claim that vegan diets “also kill animals or insects” or that eating crops causes deforestation, is simply not a well thought out argument as the vast majority of crop land is used to feed the animals that people use for food.

According to the Oxford study we could reduce global farmland by more than 75% by adopting a vegan lifestyle, which would in turn, reduce all other negative consequences of plant farming including; crop deaths, deforestation, pesticide use etc.

There are also much better ways to farm plant foods which include; indoor vertical farming and veganic farming, which can greatly reduce overall harm. Conversely there is NO ethical or humane way to exploit and murder animals for their flesh and bi-products.

So, instead of trying to find silly arguments to exploit and kill animals like “Vegans kill animals too!” Why don’t you actually help us work towards the most practical worldwide solution to minimising animal and environmental harm, which is quite obviously, a vegan world.
There is a Brazilian documentary called A Carne é Fraca, Meat (also metaphorical sense" flesh") is Weak, where they espouse the argument that all the impact on the natural resources and the environment from the agrobusiness is not being added to the price of exported meat and crops, so they argue that while it looks like the country is profiting from the exports it is actually doing it at a loss.
 
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Vegan Dogs, I don't entirely agree with this argument. While livestock may take up "X% of farmland", much of this is rangelands or other marginal grasslands on which crops cannot be grown. Yes, there is much land clearing going on for agriculture, particularly for livestock grazing and eliminating animal farming might help reduce this, but in terms of area under crops the question is, how much difference would it make to grow all the extra crops needed to feed humans a plant-based diet. As best I can tell, the answer is that a plant-based diet is better in terms of total area under crops, but it isn't as much as you'd think. In fact, depending on whise numbers you believe, it is probably somewhere between 5% and 15%. Not an amazing improvement. To say that livestock only contribute 18% of calories but use up 85% of farmland is somewhat misleading (I am assuming that by "livestock sector" they mean grazed livestock, not all animals used for food).
It us not about land for the 1 per cent of free range animals raised for slaughter for meat...but usable arable land growing farm animal feed...the meme 83 percent of land used isn't About free rAnge cattle but Amazon forest etc land destruction of nature to grow farm animal feed
 
Vegan Dogs, are you sure about that? Depending on who you quote, numbers vary. But I am pretty sure that in most cases we are talking to all land used for farming. While grazed animals don't represent much in terms of global calories, they use the vast majority of all farming land. Something like about 75% of all "farmlands", which includes land for grazing, is used for animal production. 25% is used to grow crops for human food. Of that 75%, maybe 5-10% is used to grow animal feed. Calories wise, about 83% of all calories come from plants and just 17-18% from animals. That said, your meme, while correct, is wrong to imply that vegan diets are somehow much better. Plant-based diets still cause animal and insect deaths as well as land clearing, loss of biodiveristy, ecological impacts and also damage from use of artificial fertilisers and pesticides/herbicides. As I've roughly calculated, a world without animal farming might not look an awful lot different (disregarding the ethical issue of using animals for food etc). We would not see a particularly significant reduction in land under crops overall, though it should pan out to be a reduction, at least...
 
Just 55 percent of the world's crop calories are actually eaten directly by people. Another 36 percent is used for animal feed. And the remaining 9 percent goes toward biofuels and other industrial uses. (Those figures come from this paper by Emily Cassidy and other researchers at the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment.)"​
The proportions are even more striking in the United States, where just 27 percent of crop calories are consumed directly — wheat, say, or fruits and vegetables grown in California. By contrast, more than 67 percent of crops — particularly all the soy grown in the Midwest — goes to animal feed. And a portion of the rest goes to ethanol and other biofuels.​
Some of that animal feed eventually becomes food, obviously — but it's a much, much more indirect process. It takes about 100 calories of grain to produce just 12 calories of chicken or 3 calories worth of beef, for instance​
 
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Now THIS is what I would call "good reporting".

Failing to notice this and blaming vegans eating tofu is lazy journalism. If you want to see less soya expansion, less deforestation, less biodiversity loss, and less global warming, you should eat less meat.​
Research from Oxford University found that meat, farmed fish, eggs and dairy use 83 percent of the world’s farmland and contribute more than 50 percent of food’s greenhouse gas emissions, but provide only 37 percent of our protein and 18 percent of our calories.​
Going vegan, they found, would cut your food emissions by half. So convinced was the author of this report, environmental researcher Joseph Poore, that he went vegan himself.​


 
I really liked this thread. Time to give it a little boost.

The article I posted at the bottom doesn't have any new facts or numbers or statititics. But the author did what a lot of us try to do and run the numbers. Also he has some knowledge to impart.

A lot of good stuff in this article. Here are just two.

We currently use 17.5m hectares of farmland in the UK. Fairlie finds that while a diet containing a moderate amount (less than we currently consume) of meat, dairy and eggs would require the use of 11m hectares of land (4m of which would be arable), a vegan diet would demand a total of just 3m. Not only do humans need no pasture, but we use grains and pulses more efficiently when we eat them ourselves.​
Global food production has been comfortably beating population growth for 60 years. In 1961, there were 2,200 kcals a day available for every person on Earth. By 2011, this had risen to almost 2,900. Crop production as a whole has risen much higher: to an astonishing total of 5,400 kcal per person per day. But almost half these calories are lost, mainly through feeding the food to farm animals, but also through using it for other purposes (such as biofuels) and through waste. Even so, in principle, there is more than enough for everyone, if it were affordable and well distributed. So how come chronic hunger has been rising globally since 2015? It’s the result of a lethal combination of inequality and systemic instability in global food distribution – an issue I hope to cover in my column next week.​
 
More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Most of the rest is used for biofuels, industry or vegetable oils. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh.


The proportions are even more striking in the United States, where just 27 percent of crop calories are consumed directly — wheat, soy, or fruits and vegetables grown in California. By contrast, more than 67 percent of crops — particularly all the soy grown in the Midwest — goes to animal feed. And a portion of the rest goes to ethanol and other biofuels.