Happy Veganuary: A breakdown of How Much Land the Meat Industry Uses Worldwide
Making a difference in global land use can be as easy as ditching meat for one day a week, but why is the stigma around a plant-based, vegan, or vegetarian diet so negative? It's now “Veganuary '', a time when social media marketing teams are cranking out “go vegan!” posts like crazy, and everyone's new year's resolution is to eat healthier. With so much being thrown at you, it's hard to tell the difference between fact and fiction. Let’s take a look at one thing that never lies: the numbers. Realizing what difference a plant based diet can make is as easy as breaking down the statistics.
But first, what makes something plant based? Plant based foods are completely made up of fruits, vegetables, seeds, grains, and beans. Plant based diets are centered around these 5 pillars, too. A full vegan diet may not be a realistic, or affordable option for some people, but veganism isn’t your only option. Diets such as vegetarian and pescetarian still eat some animal products, but cut back drastically on meat consumption. There are many different diets that can make an impact if normalized worldwide.
The agriculture industry as a whole has many environmental impacts, but the meat industry proposes a problem specifically due to the amount of land it uses. This land is split up into two types, which combined take a total of 4.13 Billion hectares. (1 hectare is equal to 107639 square feet) The bigger of the two is land on which the animals graze and actually live. This part takes up 2.89 billion hectares. If a diet consisting of no mutton, and reducing the amount of beef produced to only beef from dairy cows was adopted, this number would be cut in half, turning into 1.04 billion hectares. How many people do you know that actually eat mutton on a daily basis? A meat-reduced diet like this wouldn't be so hard to embrace.
Land that poultry animals don't even live on is used to grow crops that go directly to feeding the animals. This is the second kind of land. These crops consist of corn, sorghum, barley, and oats. Croplands take up 1.24 billion hectares. The previously mentioned diet would also reduce this number, turning it into 1.17 billion hectares. Only 55% of croplands worldwide grow crops that go directly to humans. If there was a lesser need to feed livestock, which is an effect of a plant-based diet, more land could be used to produce food for direct human consumption.
With these two major contributors, livestock farming takes up 80% of land worldwide, with 41% of it being in the continental United States. The no-mutton-dairy-cow-only diet (not a very catchy name), would only use 2.21 billion hectares total. That is nearly half of the 4.13 billion mentioned earlier, which is what’s currently used. To count what little habitable land the world has, close to half of it is used for agriculture, leaving the other half to be spread out like so: 38% of forests, 11% is shrubs/grasslands, 1% is covered in freshwater, and the final 1% is urban areas, including all cities and human infrastructure.
The constant expansion of the agriculture industry has its own set of consequences, and is one of the top benefactors of deforestation. Forests and other natural lands are being destroyed in order to make space for more mega-sized pastures and croplands. Grazing alone accounts for 40% of deforestation, and when combined with land used to grow crops consumed by humans and animals, farmland expansion is responsible for 90%. Deforestation causes a completely separate set of problems such as global warming, and only gets worse as more and more farmlands are built. Switching to a plant based diet would reduce land use for grazing, and in turn, result in a lesser need to use such large portions of land for feeding crops. With both factors affected, a global plant-based diet would reduce land use for agriculture by a total of 75%. The amount of land used would cut back to just 1 billion hectares, a quarter of what’s used now. The mass of land we could gain back by adopting a plant-based diet would be roughly the size of North America and Brazil.
What would humans even do if we gained back that much land around the world? Honestly, I have no clue, but it seems like I may have to start brainstorming, because plant-based eating is on the rise. Between the years of 2017 and 2022, the amount of Gen Z adopting a vegan diet went from 3%, to 21%. So, as much as all of the steak lovers out there might hurt to believe it, going plant based is one of the most beneficial things we can do for the world. Maybe try not having meat in your dinner tonight, or start buying makeup brands that don’t contain any animal byproducts, either one is an easy and sustainable option.
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