About 2,000 pounds of grains must be supplied to livestock
in order to produce enough meat and other livestock products
to support a person for a year,
whereas 400 pounds of grain
eaten directly will support a person for a year. Thus, a given
quantity of grain eaten directly will feed 5 times as many people
as it will if it is eaten indirectly by humans in the form of livestock products....
[M.E. Ensminger, PH.D.]
This chart represents water needed to produce one pound of product.
Too bad we can't just live off of water.
*According to the USDA, one pound of ground lean beef has 1197.5 calories.
The USDA lists one pound of potatoes as containing 288 calories. To get roughly the same amount of calories from potatoes as you do from a pound of beef,
you would need 4.15 pounds of potatoes.
So that's 249 gallons of water for 4.15 pounds potatoes versus 12,009 gallons for the pound of beef
-- in order to get the same number of calories from the two foods. In short,
it takes nearly 50 times more water to produce a calorie from beef as it does from potatoes.
Is this an efficient and fair way to feed the world?
Is it sustainable, even in light of the cash subsidies, super-low water prices,
free or low-cost grazing on public lands, and the other enormous welfare
handouts the meat industry receives from government,
in order to keep the price of meat artificially low? [http://www.vegsource.com/articles/pimentel_water.htm]
Putting water use info into perspective
If you shower each day for 7 minutes, using a shower with a flow rate of 2 gallons per minute, you are using 14 gallons of water per day (7 minutes x 2 gallons), or 98 gallons per week. Rounding that up to 100 gallons per week, in 52 weeks you would be using 5,200 gallons of water per year to take a daily shower.
Comparing 5,200 gallons of water used by taking a 7 minute shower every day for a year, to the 5,214 gallons of water it takes to produce a pound of beef (using the estimate noted by water specialists at the University of California, noted above), you realize that in California today, you can save more water by not eating a pound of beef than you will save by not showering for a year.
Take your choice -- 4 hamburgers or a year's worth of showers?
"In a world where an estimated one in every six people goes hungry every day, the politics of meat consumption are increasingly heated, since meat production is an inefficient use of grain -- the grain is used more efficiently when consumed directly by humans. Continued growth in meat output is dependent on feeding grains to animals, creating competition for grain between affluent meat eaters and the world's poor." -Worldwatch Institute
FOOD CHOICES AND THE ENVIRONMENT
"The contamination of the nations' waterways from [pork] manure run-off is extremely serious. Twenty tons of [pork and other] livestock manure are produced for every household in the country. We have strict laws governing the disposal of human waste, but the regulations are lax, or often nonexistent, for animal waste."
- Union of Concerned Scientists "A report by the United States Department of Agriculture estimates that 89 percent of U.S. beef ground into patties contains traces of the deadly E. coli strain."
- Reuters News Service 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 development combined."
- Philip Fradkin, in Audubon
Gallons of oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez: 12 million
Gallons of animal waste spilled into the Neuse River in North Carolina on June 21, 1995, when a "lagoon" holding 8 acres of hog excrement burst: 25 million
Fish killed as an immediate result: 10-14 million
Fish whose breeding area was decimated by this disaster: Half of all mid-east coast fish species
Acres of coastal wetlands closed to shell fishing as a result: 364,000
Amount of waste produced by North Carolina's 7 million factory-raised hogs (stored in reeking, open cesspools) compared to the amount produced by the state's 6.5 million people: 4 to 1
Relative concentration of pathogens in hog waste compared to human sewage: 10 to 100 times greater
Number of poultry operations (according to the General Accounting Office) that are of sufficient size to be required to obtain a discharge permit under the Clean Water Act: About 2,000
Number (according to the General Accounting Office) that have actually done so: 39
Number of the 22 largest animal factories in Missouri that are required to have valid operating discharge permits, that actually have them: 2
Number one milk producing are in the U.S.: California's Central Valley
Amount of waste produced by the 1,600 dairies in California's Central Valley: More than the entire human population of Texas
Total number of water quality inspectors in California's Central Valley: 4
Cities that rely on California's Central Valley as a source of drinking water: Los Angeles, San Diego, and most cities in between.
Number of Californians whose drinking water is threatened by contamination from dairy manure: 20 million (65% of the state's population).
Pathogen, stemming from dairy manure, that sickened 400,000 people and killed more than 100 people in Milwaukee in 1993: Cryptosporidium
Pathogen that Los Angeles metropolitan water district officials say is a constant threat to L.A. drinking water from Central Valley dairy waste: Cryptosporidium
Number of California beach closings due to water pollution in 1998: 5,285
"American feed (for livestock) takes so much energy to grow that it might as well be a petroleum byproduct"
- WorldWatch Institute Calories of fossil fuel expended to produce 1 calorie of protein from soybeans: 2
Calories of fossil fuel expended to produce 1 calorie of protein from corn or wheat: 3
Calories of fossil fuel expended to produce 1 calorie of protein from beef: 78
Amount of greenhouse-warming carbon gas released by driving a typical American car, in one day: 3 kilograms
Amount released by clearing and burning enough Costa Rican rainforest to produce beef for one hamburger: 75 kilograms
Number of species of birds in one square mile of Amazon rainforest: More than exist in all of North America
Life forms destroyed in the production of each fast-food hamburger made from rainforest beef: Members of 20 to 30 different plant species, 100 different insect species, and dozens of bird, mammal, and reptile species
Length of time before the Indonesian forests, all 280 million acres of them, would be completely gone if they were cleared to produce enough beef for Indonesians to eat as much beef, per person, as the people of the United States do: 3.5 years
Length of time before the Costa Rican rainforest would be completely gone if it were cleared to produce enough beef for the people of Costa Rica to eat as much beef, per person, as the people of the United States eat: 1 year
What a hamburger produced by clearing forest in India would cost if the real costs were included in the price rather than subsidized: $200
Most of the public lands in the West, and especially the Southwest, are what you might call 'cow burnt.' Almost anywhere and everywhere you go in the American West you find hordes of cows. . . They are a pest and a plague. They pollute our springs and streams and rivers. They infest our canyons, valleys, meadows and forests. They graze off the native bluestems and grama and bunch grasses, leaving behind jungles of prickly pear. They trample down the native forbs and shrubs and cacti. They spread the exotic cheatgrass, the Russian thistle, and the crested wheat grass. Even when the cattle are not physically present, you see the dung and the flies and the mud and the dust and the general destruction. If you don't see it, you'll smell it. The whole American West stinks of cattle."
- Edward Abbey, conservationist and author, in a speech before cattlemen at the University of Montana in 1985 World's mammalian species currently threatened with extinction: 25%
Leading cause of species in the tropical rainforests being threatened or eliminated: Livestock grazing
Leading cause of species in the United States being threatened or eliminated (according to the U.S. Congress General Accounting Office): Livestock grazing
[john Robbins http://www.vegsource.com/articles/factoids.htm]
The Environment
Throughout the 20th century growing populations and ever-increasing industrialisation had devastating effects on our environment. Global warming, widespread pollution, deforestation, land degradation and species extinction are just some of the problems we now face. The full consequences of such large-scale environmental degradation are impossible to judge, but what we do know is that the impacts on humanity will be most devastating in the developing world. With hundreds of millions of people already not obtaining enough food to meet their basic needs and billions of people lacking access to safe water supplies, it is imperative that we find sustainable methods of food production that do not further degrade planetary health.
"Removing the causes of environmental degradation is often more effective than seeking to control the symptoms."
Cornelis de Haan, Livestock Adviser to the World Bank [1]
Agriculture in general is one of the most resource-intensive and environmentally damaging aspects of industrialised living. What this means for us as individuals is that if we are trying to reduce our car use, limit the amount of water we waste, become more 'energy-efficient' and generally lessen our environmental impact, then we should also examine our eating habits.
People are increasingly becoming aware of the direct correlation between what they eat every day and the health of the planet. Environmentally conscious consumers are concerned not only with food miles, over-packaging, pesticide use and GM foods, but also question the environmental sustainability of modern animal husbandry. Farmers used to be seen as 'custodian's of the countryside,' but the overriding image of modern industrial farming is one of destruction and waste.
World meat production has quadrupled in the past 50 years and livestock now outnumber people by more than 3 to 1. [2] In other words, the livestock population is expanding at a faster rate than the human population. This trend contributes to all of the environmental problems already outlined.
A report commissioned by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank concluded that factory farming, "acts directly on land, water, air and biodiversity through the emission of animal waste, use of fossil fuels and substitution of animal genetic resources. In addition, it affects the global land base indirectly through its effect on the arable land needed to satisfy its feed concentrate requirements. Ammonia emissions from manure storage and application lead to localized acid rain and ailing forests." [3]
And the problems don't end there.
Land
Water
Energy
References Copyright © 2004-2008 Vegan Society.
