I want to preface this with the fact that I have no issue with someone being vegan, or the idea of it because it generally is better and we aren’t just killing farm animals like crazy and having bird flu and inhumane conditions for animals etc etc.
What about the habitat clearing uses for farming vegetables and other plants that we eat?
If everyone went vegan we would still have that as there would be an exponential increase in land needed for those plants to be farmed. Thus more habitat clearing.
That being said, we have hydroponics and hopefully we can find better ways to do that stuff like maybe vertical farming. Which could eliminate a good bit of that with the correct implementation.
I think veganism is a good idea but I often see arguments for it that are questionable.
I’m having trouble understanding your comment. It sounds like the gist is: Wouldn’t we have to clear more land to feed a vegan world?
The answer is no. While we might have to move what land we use a bit, in general human crops either are, or can be grown on the same land as, farm animal feed crops. Because thermodynamics is a thing it is always going to be less efficient to feed soy to a cow, who as well as heat losses spends a lot of that energy doing cow related things, than to a human directly. Particularly in an age where processing like grinding and cooking can help us extract nutrients that would otherwise be difficult for a human body trying to eat e.g. raw lentils.
Before it’s brought up, pastures are staggeringly inefficient use of land. We would actually have mass famines trying to feed everyone on pastured cattle.
It’s true that some places with pastures wouldn’t be suitable for cropping, but this is land we could return to our other earthling friends and it’s not very productive on a calorie per square km basis anyway. Also think of e.g. all the soy fields for ‘finishing’ cows or feeding chickens and pigs we could just direct use at something like a 10x calorie efficiency gain.
Thank you for the explanation and not making me feel like an idiot lol.
I know nothing about farming other than my own little ventures growing chili peppers and tomatoes and stuff. So to a layman’s mind, thinking about the limited land that are afforded to many animals that are used for food, it feels pretty reasonable to assume the situation would be different.
Thank you again for taking the time to give me the explanation that you did.
No worries, good faith questions are always welcome. We have to learn somewhere. I think https://ourworldindata.org/ has a bunch of nice graphics about land use, emissions, and efficiency if you want to browse around.
I was going to become a farmer back in highschool lol, worked on the school farm etc. A lot of stuff is hidden from people by benign images of smiling cows and so on. Animal ag is, in general, staggeringly inefficient. Most of the abject horror comes not because farmers are evil, but because it is the only way to make an affordable product (and it’s heavily subsidised!).
If you look at percentage of calories from plants across the world you see that exploited countries with low income levels generally eat a shitload more plants, and less industrialised people often reserve meat for feasts and so on (some exceptions, e.g. the Inuit but that’s very uncommon). Until recently regular consumption of animal products was the domain of royalty.
![[Meme] Veganism Reduces Suffering](https://vegantheoryclub.org/pictrs/image/a88163c5-5752-408a-b72f-673e00d2712d.jpeg){kind=link}
I want to preface this with the fact that I have no issue with someone being vegan, or the idea of it because it generally is better and we aren’t just killing farm animals like crazy and having bird flu and inhumane conditions for animals etc etc.
What about the habitat clearing uses for farming vegetables and other plants that we eat?
If everyone went vegan we would still have that as there would be an exponential increase in land needed for those plants to be farmed. Thus more habitat clearing.
That being said, we have hydroponics and hopefully we can find better ways to do that stuff like maybe vertical farming. Which could eliminate a good bit of that with the correct implementation.
I think veganism is a good idea but I often see arguments for it that are questionable.
Any insight into this would be awesome.
I’m having trouble understanding your comment. It sounds like the gist is: Wouldn’t we have to clear more land to feed a vegan world?
The answer is no. While we might have to move what land we use a bit, in general human crops either are, or can be grown on the same land as, farm animal feed crops. Because thermodynamics is a thing it is always going to be less efficient to feed soy to a cow, who as well as heat losses spends a lot of that energy doing cow related things, than to a human directly. Particularly in an age where processing like grinding and cooking can help us extract nutrients that would otherwise be difficult for a human body trying to eat e.g. raw lentils.
Before it’s brought up, pastures are staggeringly inefficient use of land. We would actually have mass famines trying to feed everyone on pastured cattle.
It’s true that some places with pastures wouldn’t be suitable for cropping, but this is land we could return to our other earthling friends and it’s not very productive on a calorie per square km basis anyway. Also think of e.g. all the soy fields for ‘finishing’ cows or feeding chickens and pigs we could just direct use at something like a 10x calorie efficiency gain.
Thank you for the explanation and not making me feel like an idiot lol.
I know nothing about farming other than my own little ventures growing chili peppers and tomatoes and stuff. So to a layman’s mind, thinking about the limited land that are afforded to many animals that are used for food, it feels pretty reasonable to assume the situation would be different.
Thank you again for taking the time to give me the explanation that you did.
No worries, good faith questions are always welcome. We have to learn somewhere. I think https://ourworldindata.org/ has a bunch of nice graphics about land use, emissions, and efficiency if you want to browse around.
I was going to become a farmer back in highschool lol, worked on the school farm etc. A lot of stuff is hidden from people by benign images of smiling cows and so on. Animal ag is, in general, staggeringly inefficient. Most of the abject horror comes not because farmers are evil, but because it is the only way to make an affordable product (and it’s heavily subsidised!).
If you look at percentage of calories from plants across the world you see that exploited countries with low income levels generally eat a shitload more plants, and less industrialised people often reserve meat for feasts and so on (some exceptions, e.g. the Inuit but that’s very uncommon). Until recently regular consumption of animal products was the domain of royalty.