What would happen to farmland if everyone went vegan?

The objection

“If everyone stopped farming animals, all that pasture and farmland would just sit idle and useless. What a waste.”

The answer

The worry assumes the world would still need that land, and the need is what disappears. Meat, farmed fish, eggs and dairy use about 83% of the world’s farmland but supply only 18% of its calories and 37% of its protein, according to Poore and Nemecek’s analysis (2018) of data from about 38,700 farms in 119 countries [1]. Take the animals out and most of the demand for land goes with them.

How much farmland would a vegan world need?

A world eating no animal products would need about a quarter of the farmland it used for food in 2010. Poore and Nemecek (2018) found that a worldwide shift to diets without animal products would cut food’s land use by 3.1 billion hectares, or 76% [1], which Our World in Data (2021) presents as a fall from 4.1 billion hectares to 1 billion [2]. Oxford’s 2018 summary of the study put the freed area at the size of the US, China, the European Union and Australia combined [3]. The saving doesn’t wait for everyone to go fully vegan: halving each animal product, by swapping its higher-emitting half of production for plant foods, delivered 67% of the land-use cut in the same study [1].

Would a vegan world need more cropland?

A vegan world would need less cropland, about 19% less than the world used for food in 2010, according to Poore and Nemecek’s model (2018) [1]. Feeding everyone on plants would expand the cropland growing food for people but shrink the cropland growing animal feed by more [1][2]. Most of what livestock eat is material people don’t currently eat, 86% by dry weight in an FAO team’s estimate (Mottet et al. 2017) [5], yet the rest still claims a large share of the world’s crops. Only 48% of the world’s cereals are eaten by people, according to Our World in Data (2021), while 41% go to animal feed and 11% to industrial uses, mainly biofuels [2].

What would happen to the land no longer needed?

Most of it would be free to return to natural vegetation, forests and other ecosystems, which Our World in Data (2021) notes would help both wildlife and the climate [2]. Poore and Nemecek (2018), using the IMAGE integrated assessment model, estimate that the freed land could remove about 8.1 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent a year over 100 years as natural vegetation re-establishes and soil carbon builds back up [1]. That is more than half of the roughly 13.7 billion tonnes the food supply chain emits each year [1].

The freed land is mostly pasture [1][2], and much of it couldn’t grow crops anyway: about two-thirds of the world’s pasture is unsuitable for them, an estimate by an FAO team (Mottet et al. 2017) that Poore and Nemecek (2018) and Our World in Data (2021) both use [1][2]. Poore and Nemecek also found the environmental impacts of ruminants turning grass into food immense under any production method practised today [1]. The case for keeping animals on land that can only be grazed has its own answer.

Some land would still need grazing animals. In the European Union, a third of the habitats protected under the Habitats Directive depend on extensive grazing, and the European Environment Agency (2026) lists land abandonment, alongside intensive farming, as a pressure on them [4]. Its preliminary estimate is that about 10 to 15% of the EU’s cattle, sheep and goats would be enough to graze those habitats if spread to the right places, and it says the grazing can come from domestic or wild animals [4].