A national flexitarian diet would reduce the amount of U.S. farmland by roughly the size of South Dakota.
Excerpt from this story from Grist:
A new report finds that the United States could more efficiently produce food if half the country’s protein supply came from plant-based or alternative proteins rather than meat or dairy.
The analysis demonstrates how a shift toward a plant-based diet provides ample benefits for the environment and the climate. In its latest report, the Good Food Institute, or GFI — a nonprofit think tank that supports the growth of alternative proteins — calculates that if Americans replaced 50 percent of their animal protein consumption with plant-based options, then 47.3 million fewer acres of cropland would be needed to grow the same amount of protein.
That land, which altogether makes up an area roughly the size of South Dakota, represents tremendous opportunities for carbon sequestration and biodiversity, according to GFI. The organization argues that if those acres weren’t used to grow crops, they could instead be transformed into carbon sinks or used to restore threatened ecosystems. That would deliver climate benefits on top of the reduction of animal agriculture’s more direct emissions sources: manure and cow burps.
The U.S. currently devotes a tremendous amount of land to agriculture: Over 60 percent of land in the contiguous U.S. is used for agriculture, and 21 percent of that is cropland. A majority of the nation’s cropland — 78 percent — is used to raise crops that are primarily used to feed animals.
The shift toward increased alternative protein production detailed in the GFI report would not require growing more plants. Instead, the U.S. could meet its current protein demand by growing fewer crops overall, and ensuring that more of the commodity crops we already produce — such as soy, grain, corn, barley, oats, and sorghum — are grown for human consumption.
“I think a lot of people, when they hear about plant-based diets, they’re like, ‘That’s going to take so much soy,’” said Priera Panescu Scott, GFI’s lead plant-based scientist, whose background is in material and agricultural science. But Panescu Scott, who co-authored the report, points out that soy is mostly grown to feed livestock, not humans. Worldwide, a majority of soy is used for animal feed, while only 7 percent winds up becoming tofu, tempeh, soy milk, or other foods.
