• nutomicA
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    2 years ago

    I guess this also counts steppe lands in Mongolia where shepards pass through with their herds once a year. The numbers likely look different if you look at industrialized countries where animals live in stables.

    • usernamesAreTrickyOP
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      2 years ago

      If everyone ate as much meat, dairy, etc. as many industrialized countries do, there would be no land left. If everyone ate like Americans, we would need 137% of the world’s habitable land which includes forests, urban areas, arable and non-arable land, etc. Cutting down every forest wouldn’t even be enough

      Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-global-habitable-land-needed-for-agriculture-if-everyone-had-the-diet-of

      • usernamesAreTrickyOP
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        2 years ago

        Yep it takes plenty of feed:

        1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013

        For anyone curious what things look like for some of those other environmental issues:

        Transitioning to plant-based diets (PBDs) has the potential to reduce diet-related land use by 76%, diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by 49%, eutrophication by 49%, and green and blue water use by 21% and 14%, respectively, whilst garnering substantial health co-benefits

        […]

        Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].

        https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/htm

        To produce 1 kg of protein from kidney beans required approximately eighteen times less land, ten times less water, nine times less fuel, twelve times less fertilizer and ten times less pesticide in comparison to producing 1 kg of protein from beef

        https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25374332/