Land Use Facts
The destruction of ecosystems by animal agriculture
Photo by George Hiles on unsplash
As of 2020, the global death toll for farmed land animals exceeded 80 billion annually.
Dairy photo by Jo Anne Mcarthur & Harvest Mice photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
The animal agriculture industry harms and kills a staggering number of animals in many obvious and less obvious ways, such as turning forests, wetlands, and other habitats into grazing and animal feed crop land.
The global death toll for farmed animals is 80 billion per YEAR! Sadly, that staggering number is dwarfed by the number of aquatic animals killed, whose numbers are in the trillions and so too many to be accurately estimated.
There is little information regarding the trillions of wild animals lost due to habitat destruction because these numbers are also far too high to be accurately estimated.
- The most visible mark that humanity has left on the planet is the transformation of wild habitats into farmland.
- Almost half (44%) of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture.1 In total, it is an area of 48 million square kilometres (km2). That’s around five times the size of the United States.2
- Croplands make up one-third of agricultural land, and grazing land makes up the remaining two-thirds.3
- However, only half of the world’s croplands are used to grow crops that are consumed by humans directly. We use a lot of land to grow crops for biofuels and other industrial products, and an even bigger share is used to feed livestock.4
- If we combine global grazing land with the amount of cropland used for animal feed, livestock accounts for 80% of agricultural land use. The vast majority of the world’s agricultural land is used to raise livestock for meat and dairy.
- Crops for humans account for 16%.
- Despite the vast amount of land used for livestock animals, they contribute quite a small share of the global calorie and protein supply. Meat, dairy, and farmed fish provide just 17% of the world’s calories, and 38% of its protein.6
Photo by Tanner Yould on Unsplash
We can also see the simple breakdown of how the world’s land is used in the chart below. As you can see, the area of land used for livestock — including grazing land and croplands for animal feed — is as large as the entire Americas.
Seventy percent of the Earth’s plants and animals dwell in forests, and deforestation affects them directly. Once their habitat is lost, they are on their way to extinction.
According to recent estimates, the world is losing 137 species of plants, animals and insects every day to deforestation. A horrifying 50,000 species become extinct each year.
When we cut down forests, more than just animals die.
Forests are home to a wide range of plants and animals, and when we destroy them, we also destroy many different microorganisms.
The world can use much less land for farming
The long-run historical trend of expanding farmland does not have to continue. There are ways that we can cut agricultural land use — by a lot.
By shifting towards more plant-based diets, we would save large amounts of land through reductions in grazing land, and croplands for animal feed.
This would be a huge win if we want to preserve the world’s biodiversity. Food production is the biggest driver of biodiversity loss across the world. This was true for most of our history and is still true today.
“‘The direct impact animal agriculture has on farmed animals is clear. In the industry, billions of land and trillions of aquatic animals are forced into unnatural quarters, made to live in their own excrement and often killed before reaching the age of one; in the dairy and egg industries, mothers are repeatedly artificially inseminated and separated from their young, causing extreme distress for all (Farm Transparency Project, 2022; RSPCA, 2022). Not so obvious are the secondary effects this industry has on the environment, which affects all its inhabitants—human and nonhuman.”
“We depend on a healthy environment for our own survival. The huge abundance and variety of the natural world (sometimes called biodiversity) is essential for food, clean water and medicines. The rapid loss of biodiversity, largely driven by industrial farming, could be as big a threat to our existence as climate change.” Brown, 2022, n.p.
Deforestation
Meat production is the single greatest cause of deforestation globally, with about half of the world’s habitable land used for this purpose (Brown, 2022; Ritchie & Roser, 2021). In 2017, the Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) announced that livestock production uses 70% of all agricultural land; in the last two years, that number grew to 77% (Ritchie & Roser 2021; FAO, 2020; FAO, 2017). Agricultural land is made up of pasture for grazing and land to grow crops for animal feed (Ritchie & Roser, 2021). Despite taking up such a large (and ever-rising) percentage of land, livestock “only produces 18% of the world’s calories and 37% of total protein” (Ritchie & Roser, 2021, n.p.). In other words, if crops such as soya were grown for the purpose of directly feeding people, as opposed to being used to mass-feed cattle, the world would be more abundant in food.
Livestock waste has proved to be an additional cause of water contamination. Manure, in addition to releasing methane emissions into the atmosphere, pollutes water quality by containing nitrates, phosphates and ammonia (Clean Water Action, 2022; FAO, 2017).
