Of the total area that is used by humans (Agriculture, Urban and Built-up Land),
- urban and built-up land is 1m km²,
- agriculture is 48m km²,
so agriculture is 48 of 49 millions km² used, that’s 98%. The remaining 2% are all streets and housing and other infrastructure together.
This chart also shows how terribly inefficient animal farming is.
Most pasture land isn’t suitable as farmland - there’s examples of overlap of course, but you really can’t draw that conclusion from the chart, it leaves out far too much information.
Okay, but can we stop using suitable farmland to grow corn cattle feed?
I’m wholly in support of this plan.
The US could feed its own population multiple times over if we used something like 30% of our current agricultural farmland subject to growing animal feed instead for growing things like corn, soybean, and wheat, as well as vegetables and fruit.
We’d still need to import some stuff, but we could cover the vast majority of Americans’ nutrition doing this WHILE at the same time re-wilding the country and helping restore biodiversity.
Hope to see this shift in my lifetime
Yep for sure. The food grown to feed livestock (6M2 km) seems like it’s just feeding humans with extra steps. If you cut that out and feed humans directly. You’d still have livestock on grazing pad (32M2 km), just not the whole feedlot situation.
Or go a step further and stop doing animal farming.
Yeah, and those extra steps require more land and more water and more transportation and more harvesting and more processing etc etc. Every extra step makes the whole system less efficient. We’re essentially sacrificing farmland.
At that point we don’t need to farm animals.
Best thing to do at that point would be to outlaw breeding of new farm animals, send the remaining ones to sanctuaries, and let them live the rest of their lives out on their own terms. Might need to sterilize as well.
All of this would aim to restore natural populations of cows, pigs, chickens, goats, sheep, etc. in the world to native levels. And if those animals aren’t native, then imo there is no reason to help sustain them. Release to the wild at some point and let nature take it’s course. Of course, this also means restoring natural predators to ecosystems like wolves, which would help keep populations in check.
Those species that are native, however, but are declining and on the brink of extinction: those we should focus on for conservation and regeneration.
It’s a tough balance, but it can be done ethically
Most of the corn cattle are eating is the stalk and husks. The stuff we’re going to grow regardless and would otherwise throw away.
Near slaughter when they get fattened up on feed lots (called finishing) it’s mostly cracked corn grain, it’s more towards the beggining of life that they’re fed roughage with only a small amount of supporting grain.
It’s not only pastures. Growing animal feed is vastly less efficient than growing food for humans directly. We could stop farming animals, use some of that land for growing human food, rewild the excess, and rewild the pastures.
No, it doesn’t.
The entire mid- and western US is largely unable to grow crops - “this land was made for the buffalo, and hates the plow”.
See Bowl, Dust.
To make it grow crops, we’ve been pumping out a massive aquifer since the early 20th century. Subsidence caused by this is a major concern, in addition to the aquifer not refilling as fast as we use it.
In the western portions of CO, basically all of Wyoming, NM, Arizona (arid places), crops simply can’t grow at any significant level - but that land can grow crops for grazing animals, especially cows. Sheep and goats destroy such grazing land, which explains the conflict between cattlemen and sheepherders in the 19th century.
Really the entire breadbasket is naturally suited to cows, not crops, as it supported millions of bison.
You should probably read more before pontificating.
Yes, but you omitted all the croplands we use for feeding non-human animals.
Poore and Nemecek estimate that 50% of croplands are used for human food, 38% is for livestock feed and 12% is for non-food uses.
https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
Also, if our goal is to find the truth in all of this, why be mean?
They didn’t really omit that as an oversight, it’s just not relevant to their thesis - agricultural land used for animal feed is not super relevant to the disparity in land utilization, as 80% of all agricultural land usage is pasture/grazing. Only 7% of agricultural land is used for growing animal feed.
Agreed about being a little mean though, although I do sympathize with being frustrated about this as AG land use is a very often misunderstood statistic.
poore and nemecek did some sloppy work in that 2018 paper, and it’s conclusions should not be believed
You raise some valid points, but I don’t see why it’s necessary to be so rude about it.
How is that rude
Stop farming animals, rewild the pastures, grow human food where animal feed was once grown.
What do you think the buffalo live on genius ?
This chart is designed to push that agenda but the raw numbers disagree.
They are using some favorable math that excludes all the waste goes into human food products and including all of the waste in animal feed.
Humans throw away a vast majority of our calories, not just at the individual level but across the entire supply chain. It makes the numbers really easy to play with.
Anyone who focuses on beef is manipulating the data. Pork, poultry and dairy are far more efficient so it’s left out. The price of each these things directly reflects this because it turns out global capitalism is actually really good at determine comparative values.
Pork and poultry might not use as much land as beef directly but they use a lot of land to grow animal feed. I don’t think the chart focuses on beef, but beef might skew the land area chart for meat indeed.
You might not like “the agenda”, but the truth is still that eating meat is an inefficient way to produce calories on a global level. On a small scale, it makes sense - animal farming often feeds off of human waste, contributes fertiliser, provides some extra calories in the winter. But at a global scale, what happens is whole countries are dedicated to producing animal feed and pastures. And if you remember the trofic levels from science class, you lose an order of magnitude of energy when you go up a level in the food chain.
Humans throw away food across the board. I don’t understand how this is relevant to the point you’re making.
Oh, and don’t forget how much meat is subsidised in most countries. Capitalism loves to hide the real costs of the product.
Animal food use should be pulled back a lot. But let’s also concentrate on how much of agriculture area is used for non-food.
If some of the land used for pastures and for growing animal feed were used to grow food directly for humans, and the rest were rewilded, human land use would be massively lower.
Ban animal farming. It’s as vile as genocide and quite similar to it, and it wastes lots of our resources and damages the environment.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk
Land use would be lower if we reduced livestock, but likely not massively. Lots of grazing land isn’t suitable for farming, letting it go wild would also require a massive effort to reintroduce natural grazing animals, which would likely need active management. There’s also the fact most of our crops would need to change to optimize for human consumption, and humans aren’t as efficient at consuming those calories as livestock. Even after transitioning crops there’s going to be a significant amount that isn’t processable by humans that would sustain some amount of livestock.
Land use would be lower if we reduced livestock, but likely not massively. Lots of grazing land isn’t suitable for farming, letting it go wild would also require a massive effort to reintroduce natural grazing animals, which would likely need active management.
16% of the current farmland gives us around 75% of our diets. That means we only need around 21% for a 100% plant based diet. This also means we can free up 75% of animal land. I sure we can easily find that 5% in that whole 80%, don’t you think?
There’s also the fact most of our crops would need to change to optimize for human consumption, and humans aren’t as efficient at consuming those calories as livestock.
This is incorrect.
There’s a few diseases and allergies though where this becomes a thing. But even in such cases meat can be avoided.
Even after transitioning crops there’s going to be a significant amount that isn’t processable by humans that would sustain some amount of livestock.
This could be an argument if it was forced overnight but that would never happen. Transitioning towards a plant based society is not something that can happen overnight and will definitely take time. Phasing it out happens naturally.
Rewild the grazing land and grow human food crops on the animal feed crop fields
Lots of grazing land isn’t suitable for farming,
Yeah no. Meat animals can only be raised on land which can grow crops.
The grazing land in Africa and the middle east is principally used for textiles like wool and cashmere.
grazing land is barely even a consideration in this calculation. Most of the land use of animal agriculture is for growing their feed, such as soy, corn, alfalfa
that’s not true. grazing land is the majority of the land use in animal agriculture
💚
Thanks for ignoring all the nuances of marginal land management, tell me more about how you have no experience in the sector? Jesus people from the states think they know fucking everything
German here, please go ahead and explain how animal farming isn’t the worst shit.
It can make use of marginal land, otherwise unusable for producing food, to produce food. Yknow, the stuff we eat? To stay alive? I personally think the worst shit is cage farming, which is what I’m guessing comes to mind for you?
that’s nice for the miniscule fraction of meat that comes from such farming, cool misdirect though
Maybe if you mean factory farming when you say farming, you should clarify that when you say ‘we should stop all farming’ because responsible farming is completely possible, you just don’t want to admit it
Oh I think we should stop all animal farming too, because it is reprehensible. And so-called “responsible farming” is not nearly possible at a scale to meet humanity’s demand for meat. It could only be a luxury for the wealthy, which I would also object to.
TIL rural Vietnam is wealthy
While technically true, the majority of animal farming is “factory farming” such as chickens and all cattle that is finished on grain.
I live in New Zealand, where ‘farming’ means a very different thing to me than it does you. Sorry we won’t see eye to eye on this.
I am not from the US
You can see this very clearly flying almost anywhere. It’s most obvious in places like the Midwest US, but even between cities in more densely populated regions, there’s so much farmland. Islands of concrete in oceans of ordered crop fields.
Weird to include textile farming with meats. Sure wool is a textile, but so is cotton, flax, wood fibre, jute, hemp etc.
It would have made more sense to divide agriculture into food agriculture and non-food agriculture. And then go into calorie supply.
i think the reason for that might be that some native communities actually use the same animal for multiple products, i.e. using sheep for their wool but also for their meat.
Not just native cultures. Very little of any animal goes to waste, from food to clothes to compost. If capitalism is good for anything, it’s finding value in every part.
Well done for mentioning hemp. Hemp’s actually a great example confounding the over-simplified division, being great for both food production and non-food production, like sheep too (for wool and meat). Efficient use would not be wasting anything from any production, further confounding the over-simplified division. Capitalist big industry has a bad habit of not doing that kind of efficiency though.
There is a “non-food crops” slice in the agricultural land part which seems to do exactly this though.
This does not even seem close to the truth. Just a gut feeling though, not proof of anything.
It does seem to be missing mining/quary land, logging operations, oil fields, non-urban infrastructure (like highways), and parkland that kinda straddles human and wild land.
Not sure any of those other than the parks would add up to over 1%, though.
Around where I am, I could believe it, though. Outside of the cities, there’s many areas where you just see farm fields split up by roads and power lines from horizon to horizon.
It’s close, I worked on a paper pretty much doing exactly this a while back and we had included all of this, metal and oil extraction, all roads, railways, even golf courses on top of your housing. We were at 1.2% of world’s land usage. So I’m sure whatever they got is sensible.
Logging might be missing, but in our data logging was part of forests. So it ties in that regard.
Most unsustainable “logging land” is basically turned into grazing land. Brazil and the cut rainforests are a great example. But logging can be quite sustainable too: with some caveats, that can basically count as forest.
Oil fields are tiny, and share lands with other projects. See: west Texas, with cattle and windmills on the same land as the wells.
Parkland is often more “wild” than actual wild. Especially nature reserves.
IDK about highway statistics, but they really don’t take up a lot of physical land. Though their effect of dividing wilds is certainly understated in the graph.
IDK about mining either, but also it doesn’t seem like this would take up a ton of land. It’s really concentrated by necessity, and the worst environmental effects are usually related to pollutants or other knock-on effects.
The one fishy thing to me is grazing land. In places like Africa, there are lots of tribes and other low tech herders, and if you walk around, it really feels like their unfenced areas straddle the line between wilds and grazing lands. It’s nothing like (say) west Texas with vast fields of clearly dedicated grazing land.
People will say this is vegan propaganda
this is vegan propaganda
people, come on man
It was the obvious joke reply. True or not, works either way. [Edit: and works either way as to whether replying to the original post or that reply.]
it certainly is, it’s just that vegan propaganda is nearly always true
all the best propaganda is true.
Right you are. Or, rather, left you are.
I mean growing food is pretty damn important. Obviously we could be way more efficient about it though.
Yes, when 80% of agriculture goes to feeding the food (animals) we choose to eat, which is a terrible idea but also delicious, and most humans are only slightly smarter than farm animals anyway so can you blame us? (Yes, you can.)
I really hate the political meme of “they’re taking away our meat!” It’s been drummed up pre-emptively, before these sorts of illustrations can possibly take hold.
I saw this great documentary about a US Deep South native, a fried chicken lover, a CEO as white and conservative as you can get on a mission to develop the best plant-based chicken on Earth. This nut has frycooks in kitchens constantly testing it. And his pitch is awesome: it already tastes better, and if he could scale up, it’s cheaper, too. But anticompetitiveness in the global livestock industry, and PR smear campaigns, are apparently near insurmountable obstacles.
…I hate all that.
Truth doesn’t matter. Neither does practicality. It’s like we’re living in a cyberpunk novel already.
Why are lakes, rivers, and coastal water bodies under habitable land?
Because they are habitable? You can build on them, or use boats and such to live on them.
But if we count boats, then a large part of the oceans should count as habitable as well.
Maybe whoever made this didn’t consider them as land?
Edit: Although they only specify “Oceans” for the area of water, which excludes the mentioned other bodies of water. Idk…
The big takeaway for me is that maybe we should cut down on animal protein and have more plant protein in our diets.
We feed livestock almost as much plant food as we do ourselves (6m2 km vs 8m2 km). Not to mention the space taken up for grazing uses most of our agricultural land.
And of that, 70% is used to host or feed animals. The waste is insane.
14% barren land seems low to me.
essentially all deserts
basically all areas that are bright yellow on this map :)
That’s what I mean. 14% seems low just from eyeballing it. I guess if people live there, no matter how few, it gets counted as ‘habitable’. It always blows my mind when you zoom in on some of the most inhospitable places on Earth, you’ll still see little pockets of humanity eking out an existence there.
I guess if people live there, no matter how few, it gets counted as ‘habitable’.
My guess is
- barren land = little water. there’s probably a maximum amount of precipitation it must have a year.
- glaciers = no energy. there’s probably an upper limit on average yearly temperature or sth
- habitable land = has both water and sunlight (literally anything plants need to thrive)
High elevation land in the Himalayas and South America is unusable. Also land in the arctic zone in Europe and North America.
Deserts are not actually barren.
I believe It’s close, I worked on a paper about a decade ago, and our numbers were not too dissimilar, actually it’s ridiculous how similar they are. We went with the most extensive data hunt on land usage. We had non-arable land at 14.7%, which rounded up to 15% in our summary. We got multiple sources for global precipitation levels. We got registries from US, Russia, China, India, Brazil, Canada, Australia, etc totalling 65 countries, we extrapolated the rest, our extrapolation was actually 70% of the paper. We back tallied registry numbers with global weather data.
I’d argue that many of the forests account as “area that is used by humans” too. At least when they are reguarly cut down for wood.
Imagine how much more forest we could preserve if we were fully free (or even, like days of old, fully encouraged, even insisted, and even demanded) to grow hemp. In many ways multiple times more efficient than trees.
If you want to have a more visual perspective, you can check this brazilian project that tracks land cover in Brazil:
https://plataforma.brasil.mapbiomas.org/coverage/coverage_lcluAll in yellow is pasture, and in pink, cropland. The site also allows to see change over the years
Forests are not used by humans?
