What farming animals costs the rest of us.
It takes most of the world's farmland, clears forest, heats the planet, wears out our antibiotics and harms the people we pay to do the killing.
Meat, dairy, eggs and farmed fish take up about 83% of the world’s farmland. All that land returns just 18% of our calories and 37% of our protein.
83% of the farmland, for 18% of the calories.
If everyone went vegan, what would happen to all the farmland?All the world’s farmland, about 4 billion hectares. Each strip is one hundredth of it.
83% meat, dairy, eggs and farmed fish
If everyone went vegan, what would happen to all the farmland?
Feed a beef cow 100 calories of crops and 3 come back as beef.
Eaten directly, the crops we already grow could feed roughly four billion more people.
100 calories of crops
3come back
as beef
The same 100 calories, fed to other farm animals
40 as milk
22 as eggs
12 as chicken
10 as pork
A kilogram of beef has a water footprint of 15,400 litres.
Most of it is rain on pasture and feed, yet even counting only water drawn from rivers and aquifers, animal products use far more than plants. Across all of farming, they account for about 29% of the water footprint.
Over twenty years, a tonne of methane traps as much heat as about 80 tonnes of CO2.
Livestock produce about 14.5% of all human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions and about 32% of human-caused methane. A plant-based world could cut food’s emissions by roughly half.
1 tonne of methane
1 tonne of CO₂
27 tonnes of CO₂: the same heat over 100 years
80 tonnes: the same heat over the first 20 years
Methane lasts about 12 years in the air, so its warming is concentrated in the first two decades.
Cattle pasture accounts for 41% of tropical deforestation.
Agriculture drives around 90% of deforestation worldwide.
Cattle pasture 41%
Soya and palm oil 18%
Other causes
Figures: Our World in Data; IPBES (2019). Images: NASA Earth Observatory (Terra MODIS), 2000 and 2012, public domain.
Northwest Rondônia, Brazil, from orbit in 2000 and 2012. NASA describes how the cleared land in this region is turned into cattle pasture and consolidated into large ranches.
Figures: Our World in Data; IPBES (2019). Images: NASA Earth Observatory (Terra MODIS), 2000 and 2012, public domain.
Northwest Rondônia, Brazil, from orbit in 2000 and 2012. NASA describes how the cleared land in this region is turned into cattle pasture and consolidated into large ranches.
Figures: Our World in Data; IPBES (2019). Images: NASA Earth Observatory (Terra MODIS), 2000 and 2012, public domain.
What’s animal farming got to do with biodiversity loss?Three-quarters of the world’s soya is eaten by animals.
The monocultures of soya and maize that replace forest and grassland exist mostly to grow feed, and the tofu so often blamed is the thinnest stream.
- 77% fed to livestock and farmed fish
- 16% oil, biofuel and industry
- 7% eaten by people as tofu, soya milk and edamame
By weight, about 6% of the world's mammals are wild.
Humans and the animals we farm make up the other 94%, so every elephant, deer, fox and whale alive shares that 6%.
Every wild mammal on Earth, by weight
Livestock 58%
Humans 36%
Wild mammals 6%
Resistant bacteria are being bred on the farm.
An estimated 73% of the antimicrobial drugs sold worldwide, antibiotics among them, go to farmed animals, much of it given routinely to whole herds and flocks. In 2019, 1.27 million deaths were directly attributable to drug-resistant infections.
Each capsule is 1% of the antimicrobial drugs sold worldwide.
Everything else
Farmed animals, 73%
Illustration: each dose kills the bacteria it can and leaves the resistant ones to multiply.
Everything else
Farmed animals, 73%
Illustration: each dose kills the bacteria it can and leaves the resistant ones to multiply.
Slaughterhouse work breaks the people who do it.
Meat and poultry workers suffer serious injuries at about twice the rate of other workers, and the work falls hardest on migrants and people with the fewest other options.
Slaughterhouse workers
48% with depressive symptoms
Comparison group
20%
Slaughterhouse workers
Comparison group
48% with depressive symptoms
20%
Depressive symptoms among women at a North Carolina poultry plant and other working women in the same area, from one study in a 2021 systematic review. Each group is drawn as 25 people.
A plant-based world would need 76% less farmland.
The same shift would cut food's emissions by roughly half.
The same square of farmland, if the world ate plant-based.
No longer needed: about 3.1 billion hectares, free to return to forest and grassland
An area equivalent to the US, China, the European Union and Australia combined
Still farmed: about 1 billion hectares