Wasted Resources
Vast tracts of land are needed to grow crops to feed the billions of animals we raise for food each year. Of all the agricultural land in the U.S., nearly 80 percent is used in some way to raise animals—that’s roughly half of the total land mass of the U.S.10 More than 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to create cropland to grow grain to feed farmed animals.
The U.S. certainly isn’t alone in its misuse of land for animal agriculture. As the world’s appetite for meat increases, countries across the globe are bulldozing huge swaths of land to make more room for animals and the crops to feed them. From tropical rain forests in Brazil to ancient pine forests in China, entire ecosystems are being destroyed to fuel our addiction to meat. According to scientists at the Smithsonian Institute, the equivalent of seven football fields of land is bulldozed every minute to create more room for farmed animals.
In the United States and around the world, overgrazing leads to the extinction of indigenous plant and animal species, soil erosion, and eventual desertification that renders once-fertile land barren. Livestock grazing is the number one cause of threatened and extinct species both in the United States and in other parts of the world. Philip Fradkin, of the National Audubon Society, states, “The impact of countless hooves and mouths over the years has done more to alter the type of vegetation and land forms of the West than all the water projects, strip mines, power plants, freeways, and subdivision developments combined.” As more and more land both in the U.S. and around the world is irreparably damaged at the hands of the meat industry, what little arable land does remain may not be enough to produce crops to feed the burgeoning world human population.
Overgrazing leads to the extinction of indigenous plant and animal species, soil erosion, and eventual desertification that renders once-fertile land barren.
While factory farms are ruining our land, the commercial fishing industry is pushing entire oceanic ecosystems to the brink of collapse. Commercial fishing boats indiscriminately pull as many fish as they can out of the sea, leaving ecological devastation and the bodies of nontarget animals in their wake. Fishing methods like bottom trawling and long-lining have emptied millions of miles of ocean and pushed some marine species to the brink of extinction.
Food
Raising animals for food is grossly inefficient, because while animals eat large quantities of grain, they only produce small amounts of meat, dairy products, or eggs in return. This is why more than 70 percent of the grain and cereals that we grow in this country are fed to farmed animals. It takes up to 16 pounds of grain to produce just one pound of meat, and even fish on fish farms must be fed 5 pounds of wild-caught fish to produce one pound of farmed fish flesh. All animals require many times more calories, in the form of grain, soybeans, oats, and corn, than they can possibly return in the form of animal flesh for meat-eaters to consume.
The world’s cattle alone consume a quantity of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people—more than the entire human population on Earth. About 20 percent of the world’s population, or 1.4 billion people, could be fed with the grain and soybeans fed to U.S. cattle alone. Learn more about the link between meat consumption and world hunger.
Energy
E, the respected environmental magazine, noted in 2002 that more than one-third of all fossil fuels produced in the United States are used to raise animals for food. This makes sense, since 80 percent of all agricultural land in the U.S. is used by the meat and dairy industries (this includes, of course, the land used to raise crops to feed them).
Simply add up the energy-intensive stages: (1) grow massive amounts of corn, grain, and soybeans (with all the required tilling, irrigation, crop dusters, and so on); (2) transport the grain and soybeans to manufacturers of feed on gas-guzzling, pollution-spewing 18-wheelers; (3) operate the feed mills (requiring massive energy expenditures); (4) transport the feed to the factory farms (again, in inefficient vehicles); (5) operate the factory farms; (6) truck the animals many miles to slaughter; (7) operate the slaughterhouse; (8) transport the meat to processing plants; (9) operate the meat-processing plants; (10) transport the meat to grocery stores; (11) keep the meat refrigerated or frozen in the stores, until it’s sold. Every single stage involves heavy pollution, massive amounts of greenhouse gases, and massive amounts of energy.
Most of us turn off the lights when we leave a room and attempt to conserve energy in other ways, but eating meat is the most inefficient and resource-intensive thing we do. If we Americans cut our meat consumption, our oil problems would be drastically reduced.
Water
Between watering the crops that farmed animals eat, providing drinking water for billions of animals each year, and cleaning away the filth in factory farms, transport trucks, and slaughterhouses, the farmed animal industry places a serious strain on our water supply. Nearly half of all the water used in the United States goes to raising animals for food.
It takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of meat, while growing 1 pound of wheat only requires 25 gallons. A totally vegetarian diet requires only 300 gallons of water per day, while a meat-eating diet requires more than 4,000 gallons of water per day. You save more water by not eating a pound of beef than you do by not showering for an entire year. While millions of people across the globe are faced with droughts and water shortages, much of the world’s water supply is quietly being diverted to animal agriculture. As the Western diet spreads to the rest of the world, even desert nations in Africa and the Middle East are pouring what little water they have into meat production.
It is clear that raising animals for food puts a tremendous strain on our already limited water supply, and water is used much more efficiently when it goes toward producing crops for human consumption.
Rainforest
Eating chickens destroys the rainforest. That’s the message of a major environmental organization alarmed at the rapidly increasing destruction of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. According to the nonprofit group Greenpeace, all the wild animals and trees in more than 2.9 million acres of rainforest were destroyed in the 2004-2005 crop season in order to grow crops that are used to feed chickens and other animals in factory farms. While many of the world’s largest meat, egg, and dairy-products companies are responsible for this, Greenpeace blames the notorious animal-abusing company KFC for leading the way in laying waste to the Amazon.
One of the main common crops grown in the rainforest is soy—in fact, much of the enormous amount of soy that is needed to feed the world’s farmed animals now comes from the rainforest. (The soy that is used in veggie burgers, tofu, and soy milk in the United States is almost exclusively grown domestically, not in the Amazon.) A whopping 80 percent of the world’s soy crop is used to feed farmed animals. It is hugely inefficient to feed crops to farmed animals instead of eating the crops ourselves; it takes up to 16 pounds of grain to produce just 1 pound of animal flesh. If we simply ate soy and other plant foods ourselves instead of feeding them to farmed animals, we would not need to raise nearly as much crops and we could eliminate the need to decimate the rainforest. On top of all that, by eating only plant foods instead of animal flesh, we would have enough food to feed every person in the world, making an enormous impact in the struggle against world hunger.
Pollution
What do we get back from all the grain, fossil fuels, and water that go into making animal products? Tons and tons of feces. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the run-off from factory farms pollutes our waterways more than all other industrial sources combined.
Fecal Contamination
Animals raised for food produce 130 times as much excrement as the entire U.S. population, roughly 89,000 pounds per second, all without the benefit of waste treatment systems. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, animals on factory farms in America produce 20 tons of fecal matter each year for every U.S. household. A pig farm with 5,000 animals produces as much fecal waste as a city of 50,000 people. According to Oregon State University agriculture professor Peter Cheeke, factory farming constitutes “a frontal assault on the environment, with massive groundwater and air pollution problems.”
A contamination study conducted by John Chastain, a Minnesota agricultural extension engineer, reports, “The data indicates that the pollution strength of raw manure is 160 times greater than raw municipal sewage.” In other words, farmed animal waste is much more dangerous than human waste. There are no federal guidelines that regulate how factory farms treat, store, and dispose of the trillions of pounds of concentrated, untreated animal excrement that they produce each year. This waste may be left to rot in huge lagoons or sprayed over crop fields; both of these disposal methods result in run-off that contaminates the soil and water and kills fish and other wildlife. The concentration of parasites, bacteria, and chemical contaminates in animal excrement can wreak havoc on the ecosystems affected by farm run-off, and there are countless reports that humans who live near these farms have become very sick from the pollution.
A Scripps Howard synopsis of a Senate Agricultural Committee report on farm pollution issued this warning about animal waste: “[I]t’s untreated and unsanitary, bubbling with chemicals and diseased. … It goes onto the soil and into the water that many people will, ultimately, bathe in and wash their clothes with and drink. It is poisoning rivers and killing fish and making people sick. … Catastrophic cases of pollution, sickness, and death are occurring in areas where livestock operations are concentrated. … Every place where the animal factories have located, neighbors have complained of falling sick.”3
The water we drink
Much of the millions of pounds of excrement and other bodily waste produced by farmed animals every day in the U.S. is stored in sprawling brown lagoons. These lagoons occasionally spill over into surrounding waterways and cause massive numbers of fish and other animals to die. When 25 million gallons of putrid hog urine and feces spilled into a North Carolina river in 1995, between 10 and 14 million fish died as an immediate result. This spill was twice as large in volume as the Exxon-Valdez oil disaster, but even smaller amounts of factory-farm runoff can wreak havoc on the environment—the pesticides, antibiotics, and powerful growth hormones that are concentrated in animal flesh are also found in their feces, and these chemicals can have catastrophic effects on the ecosystems surrounding factory farms. In West Virginia and Maryland, for example, scientists have recently discovered that male fish are growing ovaries, and they suspect that this freakish deformity is the result of factory-farm run-off from drug-laden chicken feces.
The EPA reports that chicken, hog, and cattle excrement have polluted 35,000 miles of rivers in 22 states and contaminated groundwater in 17 states. Besides the environmental problems caused by farmed animal waste, the dangerous fecal bacteria from farm sewage, including E. coli, can also cause serious illness in humans.
The pollution from animal factories is also destroying parts of the world’s oceans. In the middle of the United States, streams and rivers carry excrement from animal factories to the Mississippi River, which then deposits the waste in the Gulf of Mexico. The nitrogen from animal feces—and from fertilizer, which is primarily used to grow crops for farmed animals—causes algae populations to skyrocket, leaving little oxygen for other life forms. A 2006 report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that the Gulf of Mexico’s “dead zone”—an area in which virtually all the sea animals and plants have died—is now half the size of Maryland. In 2006, a separate study by Princeton University found that a shift away from meat production—as well as Americans’ adoption of vegetarian diets—would dramatically reduce the amount of nitrogen in the Gulf to levels that would make the dead zone “small or non-existent.”
Pfiesteria, a deadly microbe that has killed billions of fish, is believed to have originated from sewage run-off from pig and poultry farms in North Carolina and the Delmarva Peninsula.
Fish farms also contribute to water pollution—farmers cram thousands of fish into tiny enclosures, and the accumulation of feces and other waste means that aquafarms are little more than open sewers. The massive amounts of feces, fish carcasses, and antibiotic-laced fish food that settle below fish farm cages have actually caused the ocean floor to rot in some areas, and the sludge of fish feces and other debris can be toxic for already-strained ocean ecosystems.
Amazingly, the federal government continues to allow animal factories to negatively impact the health of Americans who live near animal factories. In 2006, public-interest and environmental advocates expressed shock and anger when the EPA proposed a new loophole that would make it even easier for giant animal factories to pollute the water and air without any oversight. Ed Hopkins, director of the Sierra Club’s Environmental Quality Program, said that the new loophole “essentially means that these facilities are going to be able to continue to use our streams and rivers as sewers.”
The air we breathe
Factory farms also produce massive amounts of dust and other contamination that pollutes our air. A study in Texas found that animal feedlots in the state produce more than 14 million pounds of particulate dust every year and that the dust “contains biologically active organisms such as bacteria, mold, and fungi from the feces and the feed.” The massive amounts of excrement produced by these farms emit toxic gases such as hydrogen sulfide and ammonia into the air. The EPA reports that roughly 80 percent of ammonia emissions in the United States come from animal waste.
As if the chemicals and particulate matter from animal waste weren’t bad enough, the meat and dairy industries often knowingly add to the air-quality crisis. When the cesspools holding tons of urine and feces get full, factory farms will frequently get around water pollution limits by spraying liquid manure into the air, creating mists that are carried away by the wind. People who live nearby are forced to inhale the toxins and pathogens from the sprayed manure. According to a report by the California State Senate, “Studies have shown that [animal waste] lagoons emit toxic airborne chemicals that can cause inflammatory, immune, irritation and neurochemical problems in humans.”
Global Warming
Global warming has been called humankind’s “greatest challenge” and the world’s most grave environmental threat, and science shows that one of the most effective ways to fight global warming is to go vegetarian.
A 2006 United Nations report found that the meat industry produces more greenhouse gases than all the SUVs, cars, trucks, planes, and ships in the world combined.2 Greenhouse gases cause global warming, which studies show will increasingly lead to catastrophic disasters—like droughts, floods, hurricanes, rising sea levels, and disease outbreaks—unless we drastically reduce the amounts emitted into the atmosphere.
Many conscientious people are trying to help reduce global warming by driving more fuel-efficient cars and using energy-saving light bulbs, but they could do more simply by going vegetarian.
Raising animals for their flesh, eggs, and milk is one of the world’s leading emitters of carbon dioxide (CO2). But global warming is caused by more than just CO2. Animal agriculture is the leading source of methane and nitrous oxide emissions, which—combined with carbon dioxide—causes the vast majority of global warming.
Methane: The billions of farmed animals crammed into factory farms produce enormous amounts of methane, both during digestion and from the acres of cesspools filled with feces that they excrete. Methane is more than 20 times as powerful as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in our atmosphere.5 Statistics from the Environmental Protection Agency show that animal agriculture is the number one source of methane emissions in the U.S.
Nitrous Oxide: Nitrous oxide is about 300 times more potent as a global warming gas than carbon dioxide. According to the U.N., the meat, egg, and dairy industries account for a staggering 65 percent of worldwide nitrous oxide emissions.