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The title of the article and arguments in it are "If everyone were vegan, only a quarter of current farmland would be needed" - the numbers are about what is do
by helsinkiandrew 5y ago
The title of the article and arguments in it are "If everyone were vegan, only a quarter of current farmland would be needed" - the numbers are about what is done now if everyone stopped eating corn and grass fed cows and factory chickens and ate plants instead.
You might also argue that if everyone ate more insects, reindeer, forest grown chickens, more fish, or alpine cows it would also reduce farmland use, but that doesn't make their calculations fatally flawed.
- scantis 5y agoYou can only eat certain fruit bodys of plants, while animals can eat a whole lot more and the stuff you throw away. What we feed livestock isn't exactly for human consumption and mostly non human available calories. This calculation on calories has the fatal flaw, that they assume an average calories output of farmland and intake of humans and livestock. On paper it checks out, but it has no grounding in reality. Animals are great meat and protein processors, that can make farming much more efficient and sustainable. The vegan diet is fun with avocados, cacao, coconut, almonds and so on, but that is intensive stuff for farming and it can not be easily ramped up. Pigs scale much easier and can be fed with food waste.