#resource use

[acti-veg]

Sources: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05

[horsesarecreatures]

Posting because I think Hank makes a very good point here - AI, either directly or indirectly uses lots of various types of water. However, the corn industry in America alone uses 80x more water (20 trillion gallons per year vs AI's global AI data center usage of 260 billion gallons.) And what is the majority of American corn fed to? Animals and cars, not people.

[javaveggiedude]

[acti-veg]

Partial-rant, partially asking for help: how do people simultaneously believe we can grow enough crops to feed over 80 billion farmed animals a year, but 8 billion humans is impossible??? and do you have any succinct responses to the arguments that land can't grow crops suitable for humans/that most of the crops aren't edible for humans/that animals eat waste products? I don't know how to respond in a casual conversation without going on tangents they just tune out...

I think that this is one of those topics that people have not actually thought that deeply about, yet are still pretty happy to share their thoughts on… most have this idea that farmed animals are all just in fields eating grass is or hay, others who are more informed will know about things like alfalfa that humans cannot eat. Here is a short response for you:

“It isn’t true that farmed animals only consume crops that are inedible to humans. We feed about a little over a third of our crops to farmed animals, and it takes about 100 times as much land to produce a calorie of beef or lamb verses plant-based alternatives like peas or tofu. It is true that animals are often fed inedible crops like alfalfa, but the trouble is that alfalfa is grown on arable land and using water that could have been used to feed humans directly, rather than feeding to animals who we then eat. This is why we could feed far more people using far less land if we were all eating plants rather than animals.”

[acti-veg]

EU pumps four times more money into farming animals than growing plants

CAP scheme, which pays more to farms that occupy more land, drives ‘perverse outcomes for a food transition’, says study

The EU, which plans to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050, spends nearly one-third of its entire budget on CAP subsidies. “The vast majority of that is going towards products which are driving us to the brink,” said Paul Behrens, an environmental change researcher at Leiden University and co-author of the study.

The subsidy scheme, which pays more to farms that occupy more land, results in “perverse outcomes for a food transition” because livestock take up more space than plants and are inefficiently fed crops that could have gone to people, the researchers found. To produce the same amount of protein, beef requires 20 times more land than nuts and 35 times more than grains.

[acti-veg]

would everyone switching to being plant based cause ecological problems?

Plant-based diets require less land, less water, less energy, less deforestation and produce vastly lower greenhouse gas emissions. Even accounting for land that cannot be used for crops, we could comfortably feed far more people using far less resources if we were all eating plant-based. See my resource use page for an explanation on that, and the resources subpage for sources.

Keep in mind that there is no realistic scenario where this happens immediately, either. Current projections are based on current systems, but as the world transitions away from animal agriculture, we would make plant agriculture even more efficient, less damaging to soil and more sustainable. The farming of well-chosen crops directly is almost always going to be less ecologically damaging than farming animals, who require land to graze on and land to grow the vast vast quantities of crops they are fed.

All that said, there are problems that would be created through a switch to plant agriculture. Social erosion is one of them, considering how best to manage cropland so that we can re-wild less "productive" land, how we manage fertilisation and keeping out pests etc. But all of these issues are massive under our current system too, because again, farmed animals are fed vast quantities of soy, corn and wheat to get them to slaughter weight, and then you have to add on the vast tracts of (often arable, indigenous and/or deforested) land that they graze on.

Personally, I think that a plant-based agriculture system would need to include alternative proteins as well as arable crops. That could be in the form of fermented proteins which shows a lot of promise as an emerging technology, or possibly even lab grown meat if we can get rid of the animal input and make it more efficient, though I am much less convinced of that.

Either way, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that we could feed far more people, using far less land and fewer resources, if we started eating crops directly instead of feeding those crops to animals, then eating those animals. It is just an objectively more efficient way to feed our population.

[acti-veg]

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