Planet & People
Even if the animals never moved you.
The case against farming animals does not need you to love a single one of them. It is written into the water, the land, the air, the forests, and into the bodies of the people we ask to do the killing. Every figure here is cited.
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01
Fresh water
Nearly a third of farming’s water goes to animals.
A single kilogram of beef carries a water footprint of about 15,400 litres. Across all of agriculture, animal products account for roughly 29% of the total water footprint, close to a third. Most of it is rain falling on pasture and feed, but even counting only the water drawn from rivers and aquifers, animal products sit far above plants.
Most of beef’s footprint is rain, not tap water. Strip that out and animal products still dwarf plants on every measure.
Mekonnen & Hoekstra (2012), global averages
02
Land
77% of farmland. 18% of the calories.
Livestock takes up around 77% of the world’s farmland while supplying just 18% of our calories and 37% of our protein. It is the most land-hungry way humans have ever fed themselves, and most of that land was something wild first.
Poore & Nemecek (2018), Science
03
Calorie inefficiency
A farm animal is a calorie incinerator.
Feed 100 calories of crops to livestock and you get back about 40 as milk, 12 as chicken, 10 as pork and just 3 as beef. We already grow enough plant calories for everyone, then throw most of them away by routing them through animals first. Eaten directly, today’s crops could feed roughly four billion more people.
Cassidy et al. (2013)
04
Climate
It heats the planet you were going to keep.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization puts livestock at about 14.5% of all human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions, much of it methane, a gas that traps far more heat than CO₂ over its lifetime. A global shift to plant-based diets could cut food’s emissions by roughly half.
FAO (GLEAM); Poore & Nemecek (2018)
05
Deforestation
The forest is cleared to graze and to grow feed.
Agriculture drives around 90% of global deforestation, and cattle pasture is the single largest cause of tropical forest loss, about 41%. The soya so often blamed is mostly the second half of the same story: it is grown to fatten animals, not to feed people directly.
Beef pasture, not tofu, is what clears the most forest.
Our World in Data; IPBES (2019)
06
Monocropping
Three-quarters of the world’s soya is eaten by animals.
About 77% of global soya is fed to livestock and farmed fish; only around 7% is eaten directly by people as tofu, soya milk and edamame. The endless monocultures of soya and maize that replace forests and grasslands exist mostly to grow feed.
Our World in Data, Soy
07
Biodiversity
We have replaced the wild, by weight.
A census of life on Earth found that humans and the animals we farm now make up about 96% of all mammal biomass. Every wild mammal alive, every elephant, deer, fox and whale, shares the remaining 4%. Agriculture is the leading driver of biodiversity loss on land.
Humans and our livestock are about 96% of mammal biomass. Every wild mammal shares the rest.
Bar-On, Phillips & Milo (2018), PNAS
08
Antibiotic resistance
The next pandemic is being bred on the farm.
More than 73% of the world’s antibiotics are used on farmed animals rather than people, much of it routine, to keep crowded animals alive. That is a production line for resistant bacteria. In 2019, drug-resistant infections were linked to 1.27 million deaths.
Van Boeckel et al. (2017); Murray et al., The Lancet (2022)
09
The human cost
And it breaks the people who do it.
Slaughter work is among the most dangerous, lowest-paid jobs there is. Meatpacking injures workers at about twice the rate of the average job; across 29 US states, 27 workers a day suffered an amputation or were hospitalised. A systematic review links the work to sharply raised depression and anxiety. It falls hardest on migrants and people with the fewest other options.
One reviewed study found depressive symptoms in 48% of workers, against 20% in a comparison group.
OSHA / NELP; Slade & Alleyne (2021), Trauma, Violence, & Abuse
Same bill, paid by everyone.
Every figure on this page is the same diet, measured a different way. The cheapest thing you can do for the planet, and for the people on the line, is sitting on your plate three times a day.