Why A Vegan Diet Would Hurt The Environment: We Would Need To Replace More Than Just Food11/11/2018
However, what they fail to acknowledge is that a potato is just a potato. But right alongside those beef calories is leather, bonemeal, blood, hair, fat, milk, fertilizer, and a whole slew of other byproducts that you would have to farm dozens of other types of crops to replace. Here are some fun graphics from Farm Credit Knowledge Center that start to put this in perspective… So no, there really is no such thing as a vegan who never ever uses a product from an animal. Many plant-based advocates acknowledge this by saying they’re just trying to cause “the least harm possible” by cutting out the animal products where they can. However, when you do the math, the environmental harm caused by a single farm animal that you can get dozens of products from is extremely dwarfed by the production of many many crop species needed to produce each one of those products. Let’s look at an example. Cotton is a really good base point because it’s water requirement falls right in the middle of most food crop irrigation ranges. The world average amount of water needed to produce one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of cotton is 10,000 liters (2,600 gallons). To compare this with cattle (I’m working up to leather, which cotton would reasonably replace), one beef steer (I’m going to use Angus- one of the most common beef breeds in America) drinks 1.5 gallons of water per 100 pounds of body weight per day. Here’s a breakdown of how I’m totalling the amount of water they’ll drink in their lifetime of thirty months (an average):
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |