I became a #vegetarian (aspiring #vegan) almost exclusively to contribute to reduce animal #suffering.
With time, I realised that the _other_ reasons to avoid animal-based foods are surprisingly strong, too.
Land usage:
[Crops for human consumption make up only 23% of all agricultural land worldwide, and yet they provide 83% of all calories](http://hannahritchie.com/convergence-nutrition-sustainability/).
Plant-based calories (and proteins) are much more efficient and require way less land and water than meat and dairy.
Doc Freemo 
@tripu This misses a very important point... While almost all land suitable for crops is also suitable for animals the reverse isnt true. In fact it is quite often the case animals are raised on land explicitly not suitable for crops. I dont know the exact breakdown, and that would be important to evaluate this fairly. But I know from my interaction with farmers that a great many of them raise their livestock on mountainous land not suited for crops and use fertile farmland mostly for crops.. Even when the land is flat and not mountainous it is often unsuitable for crops due to the makeup of the soil (too rocky, no good drainage, etc)
> _“It is quite often the case animals are raised on land explicitly not suitable for crops.”_
If 23% of agricultural land currently dedicated to crops provides 83% of necessary calories worldwide, we would need to “reclaim” only an additional 4.7% of land from livestock usage in order to feed everyone only with plants. Even looking at protein sources, only 11.3% of land would have to be reallocated from “animals” to “plants”.
So even if it were “often the case” that land used for animals can't be used for plants, it looks like we could still do the switch.
/cc @bonifartius
You are assuming the land reclaimed from animals would have the same caloric output per acre, thats a faulty assumption.
That's true. I don't have that information.
But note that we can't assume that land reclaimed from animals would have _lower_ caloric output, either.
What we _do_ know is that one unit of land used for crops produces 16.3× as many calories and 6.8× as many proteins than one unit of land used for animals, on average.
Since we currently use more than three times as much land for animals than for plants, even assuming very conservative decreases in production, it seems the switch would be for better (less suffering, less land, less water, fewer antibiotics, less pollution, less CO₂).
I agree that if the vast majority of land used for animals now were pastures that are mostly useless for anything else, then the switch wouldn't be feasible. But is that the case?
/cc @bonifartius
> But note that we can’t assume that land reclaimed from animals would have lower caloric output, either.
Actually we can. We know livestock can be raised on both land suitable for crops and land that isnt. We also know that a lot, and perhaps even the vast majority, are raised on rocky terrain where crops cant be grown. Therefore since anywhere from some to most of the land reclaimed from animals has 0 caloties per acre, on average we know for a fact such land will have less output than current land used for crops.
The only thing we dont know is exactly how much of the land is suitabke for crops, we just know its considerably less than 100%
All of the rest of your post ia moot since it assumes thibgs we dont know to be true about reclained land.
@bonifartius
Another flaw is your assumption that the feed for livestock is taking away from land grown for humans. This too is not true. Generally livestock are fed the food waste from the part of the food we cant eat. So the edible parts go to us and the human inedible parts go to the livestock, either that or the graze on grasses on mou tainous land not suitable for crops.
So everythi g about your estimates are based on faulty assumptions.
> _“The madness starts when good meadows are plowed and used for crops. […] I've seen this being done to plan corn for bio-gas.”_
Agreed. I was referring to food only.
> _“It may certainly not ‘optimal’ to have ruminants on green land, but they create food from plants humans never could consume.”_
But we don't _need_ to raise ruminants to transform inedible plants into meat and dairy. We can grow edible plants in the first place, using far less resources and polluting less, and still feed everyone with that. That is why the current situation is not optimal (as you admit).
> _“It also doesn't make sense to drop one of the most important local protein and fat sources in cold and moderate climates, instead transporting stuff around the globe.”_
It makes total sense if the net impact of growing elsewhere + transporting is smaller than growing locally — and that seems to be the case very often.
(Only disadvantage I can think of: food sovereignty, resilience against geopolitical turmoil.)
/cc @freemo
+bonifartius 𒂼𒄄
@tripu
> But we don’t need to raise ruminants to transform inedible plants into meat and dairy. We can grow edible plants in the first place, using far less resources and polluting less, and still feed everyone with that. That is why the current situation is not optimal (as you admit).
you have to distinguish growing food to feed it to ruminants and having ruminants grazing on meadows/eating hay from meadows when the weather is too harsh.
to grow edible plants on soil where there now are meadows requires heaps of fertilizer and is a loss of habitat. it doesn't make any sense, especially not from an ecological perspective.
on the other hand having ruminants converting plant material from these soils into something human edible is almost _free lunch_.
> It makes total sense if the net impact of growing elsewhere + transporting is smaller than growing locally — and that seems to be the case very often.
i think it is dangerous to view this only from the perspective of "impact". for plant-only food you always need to fortify it with synthetic vitamins etc. which requires chemical industry requiring fossil fuels.
> (Only disadvantage I can think of: food sovereignty, resilience against geopolitical turmoil.)
this is one of the reasons why there are food shortages in the 3rd world now, local traditional food gets replaced with imported cheap/free (aid) food produced on an industrial scale.
2ct personal semi-well reasoned opinion:
i think this is also one of the reasons why we have so many problems in the 1st world now: we replaced people with machinery in a sector which gave many relatively untrained people jobs which made deep sense - feeding others. now we have many relatively untrained people in the social systems with rotting brains due to bore out, ultra cheap food and farmers who barely can live despite all the upscaling due to industrialized agriculture. would make more sense to replace the industrialized agriculture with an ecological version also with more manual labor again. raising livestock has a place in there too, but it'll be for the occasional roast on sunday and holidays, not cheap meat abundance of today.
@freemo @tripu the madness starts when good meadows are plowed and used for crops, killing an important habitat (at least in middle europe), removing a CO2 sink and ruining the soil for a very long time as it's prone to erosion. i've seen this being done to plan corn for bio-gas - of course they need artificial fertilized for it - total madness :)
it may certainly not "optimal" to have ruminants on green land, but they create food from plants humans never could consume. everyone talks about reducing climate impact.
it also doesn't make sense to drop one of the most important local protein and fat sources in cold and moderate climates, instead transporting stuff around the globe.
one thing that _should_ happen though is that livestock is again raised in more traditional ways, really grazing on meadows etc.