If everyone went vegan, what would happen to all the farmland?
Short answer: We'd need about three-quarters less of it. A plant-based world frees ~3.1 billion hectares, land that could rewild and pull billions of tonnes of CO₂ back down.
A plant-based world would free around 3.1 billion hectares, roughly the area of Africa, to return to forest and grassland.
Poore & Nemecek (2018); Our World in Data
The objection
“If everyone stopped farming animals, all that pasture and farmland would just sit idle and useless. What a waste.”
The answer
It would be the opposite of waste. The fear assumes we’d still need the land, when the land requirement is exactly what collapses. Animal farming is staggeringly land-hungry for what it returns, using around 77% of farmland to supply only 18% of calories. Take the animals out and most of that demand simply vanishes.
Poore & Nemecek modelled it precisely. A global shift to plant-based diets would cut food’s land use by about 3.1 billion hectares, a 76% reduction [1][2]. That’s an area roughly the size of Africa, no longer needed to feed anyone. Rather than sitting idle, it becomes the single largest opportunity for nature we have.
Freed land doesn’t stay empty. It regrows. As forests, wetlands and grasslands return, they pull carbon out of the air. The same body of research estimates the recovering vegetation and soils could draw down on the order of 8 billion tonnes of CO₂ a year for decades as ecosystems re-establish [2]. Rewilding at that scale is a climate tool nothing else can match.
Some land is genuinely marginal, too steep, dry or cold for crops, and the sensible answer there is rewilding or restoration rather than endless grazing that warms the planet anyway.
So the worry runs backwards. A plant-based world doesn’t strand farmland; it hands most of it back to forests, to wildlife, and to the atmosphere as a carbon sink. The real waste is what we’re doing with the land now.