What is your stance on animal rights?

Analysis of observed diets shows a positive relationship between dietary GHG emissions and the amount of animal-based products in a standard 2,000 kcal diet. This work demonstrates that reducing the intake of meat and other animal based products can make a valuable contribution to climate change mitigation. Other work has demonstrated other environmental and health benefits of a reduced meat diet. National governments that are considering an update of dietary recommendations in order to define a ‘healthy, sustainable diet’ must incorporate the recommendation to lower the consumption of animal-based products.

The production of animal protein requires significantly more water than the production of plant protein (Pimentel et al. 2004). Although US livestock directly uses only 2% of the total water used in agriculture (Solley et al. 1998), the indirect water inputs for livestock production are substantial because of the water required for forage and grain crops. Each year, a total of 253 million t grain are fed to US livestock, requiring a total of about 25 × 1013 L water (Pimentel et al. 2004). Worldwide grain production specifically for livestock requires nearly three times the amount of grain that is fed to US livestock and three times the amount of water used in the United States to produce grain feed (Pimentel et al. 2004).

Animal products vary in the amounts of water required for their production (table 2). For example, producing 1 kg chicken requires 3500 L water, whereas producing 1 kg sheep (fed on 21 kg grain and 30 kg forage) requires approximately 51,000 L water (table 2; USDA 2003, Pimentel et al. 2004). If cattle are raised on open rangeland and not in confined feedlot production, 120 to 200 kg forage are required to produce 1 kg beef. This amount of forage requires 120,000 to 200,000 L water per kg (Pimentel et al. 2004), or a minimum of 200 mm rainfall per year (Pimentel et al. 2004).

Agricultural production in the United States is projected to expand to meet the increased food needs of the US population, which is expected to double in the next 70 years (USBC 2003). Developing countries are expected to feel the impacts of this food crisis to a greater extent as demands approach those of developed countries and populations continue to rise (Rosegrant et al. 2002). Increasing crop yields necessitate a parallel increase in the use of fresh water in agriculture. Therefore, increased crop and livestock production during the next 5 to 7 decades will significantly increase the demand on all water resources, especially in the western, southern, and central United States (USDA 2003) and in many regions of the world with low rainfall.

The results show that the blue and grey water footprints of animal products are the largest for industrial systems (with an exception for chicken products). The water footprint of any animal product is larger than the water footprint of crop products with equivalent nutritional value. Finally, 29% of the total water footprint of the agricultural sector in the world is related to the production of animal products; one-third of the global water footprint of animal production is related to beef cattle.

The global meat production has almost doubled in the period 1980–2004 (FAO 2005) and this trend is likely to continue given the projected doubling of meat production in the period 2000–2050 (Steinfeld and others 2006). To meet this rising demand for animal products, the on-going shift from traditional extensive and mixed farming to industrial farming systems is likely to continue. Because of the larger dependence on concentrate feed in industrial systems, this intensification of animal production systems will result in increasing blue and grey water footprints per unit of animal product. The pressure on the global freshwater resources will thus increase both because of the increasing meat consumption and the increasing blue and grey water footprint per unit of meat consumed.

Managing the demand for animal products by promoting a dietary shift away from a meat-rich diet will be an inevitable component in the environmental policy of governments. In countries where the consumption of animal products is still quickly rising, one should critically look at how this growing demand can be moderated.

Livestock now use 30 per cent of the earth’s entire land surface, mostly permanent pasture but also including 33 per cent of the global arable land used to producing feed for livestock, the report notes. As forests are cleared to create new pastures, it is a major driver of deforestation, especially in Latin America where, for example, some 70 per cent of former forests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing.

At the same time herds cause wide-scale land degradation, with about 20 per cent of pastures considered degraded through overgrazing, compaction and erosion. This figure is even higher in the drylands where inappropriate policies and inadequate livestock management contribute to advancing desertification.

The livestock business is among the most damaging sectors to the earth’s increasingly scarce water resources, contributing among other things to water pollution from animal wastes, antibiotics and hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers and the pesticides used to spray feed crops.

New technological innovations and the economic advantage of size have driven a structural shift from small to large operations where animals are grown in houses, feedlots, and other confinement facilities. These production facilities are referred to as animal feeding operations (AFOs). Large AFOs are called concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). The largest 2% of all livestock farms now produce over 40% of all animals. The amount of manure generated in the U.S. at CAFOs and AFOs is estimated to exceed 335 million tons of dry matter per year.

With one-third of the world’s cereal harvest and 90 percent of the world’s soy harvest being raised for animal feed, the energy required to grow those crops is a major factor in these on-farm emissions. In the United States and Canada, half of all synthetic fertilizer is used for feed crops. In the UK, the total is nearly 70 percent.

A major reason that beef, in particular, has such a large environmental impact is because, of all livestock, cattle are among the worst converters of grain to meat. Whereas in nature, cattle, which are ruminants, convert inedible-to-humans grasses into high-grade proteins, under industrial production, grainfed cattle only provide about one pound of beef for every 10 to 16 pounds of feed they consume.*

Because industrialized agriculture also relies on huge amounts of water for irrigation, these farms will be much more vulnerable as climate change increases extreme droughts. Globally, 70 percent of the world’s available freshwater is being diverted to irrigation-intensive agriculture.
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Ruminant livestock, including cattle, buffalo, sheep, and goats, are the main agricultural sources of methane. Ruminants digest through microbial, or "enteric" fermentation, which produces methane that is released by the animals through belching and, to a lesser degree, via flatulence. While this process enables ruminants to digest fibrous grasses that humans can’t convert into digestible form, it also contributes to livestock’s impact on climate change. Enteric fermentation accounts for one-quarter of the total emissions from the livestock sector. (Land use changes, such as deforestation and desertification caused by over-pasturing livestock or growing feed crops, account for another 35.4%, while manure accounts for 30.5%).

Industrial livestock production also generates greenhouse gasses due to the manner in which animal waste is managed. In sustainable agricultural systems, there's no such thing as waste: manure is part of a holistic cycle and serves as fertilizer. But in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), animal waste is not cycled through the farm since there’s simply too much of it. Instead, waste is stored in huge pits euphemistically called "manure lagoons." Without sufficient oxygenation, waste stored in this manner ends up emitting methane and nitrous oxide. The US scores at the top of the world for methane emissions from manure, and pigs are at the top in terms of methane emissions, responsible for half of the globe’s total.

A large CAFO includes 1000 cattle (other than dairy, which is 700), 2500 hogs over 55 pounds, or 125,000 chickens, if a liquid manure system isn't used, and 30,000 if it does. FA liquid manure system is when the animal's urine and feces are mixed with water and held either under the facility or outside in huge open air lagoons - these manure systems create a lot of pollution (which many times taxpayers end up paying for).
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Because factory farms are considered "agricultural" instead of "industrial," they are not subject to the regulation that their scale of production (and level of pollution) warrants. Because they employ powerful lobbyists that can sway the government agencies responsible for monitoring agricultural practices, industrial farms are left free to pollute, to hire undocumented workers (and pay them next to nothing), and to locate their industrial facilities without regard to the impact it has on surrounding communities.

A global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change, a UN report said today.

As the global population surges towards a predicted 9.1 billion people by 2050, western tastes for diets rich in meat and dairy products are unsustainable, says the report from United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) international panel of sustainable resource management.

It says: “Impacts from agriculture are expected to increase substantially due to population growth increasing consumption of animal products. Unlike fossil fuels, it is difficult to look for alternatives: people have to eat. A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products.”

Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests.
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Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.
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Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This despite the inherent inefficiencies: about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States.

The environmental impact of growing so much grain for animal feed is profound. Agriculture in the United States — much of which now serves the demand for meat — contributes to nearly three-quarters of all water-quality problems in the nation’s rivers and streams, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

From one ecologist's perspective, the American system of farming grain-fed livestock consumes resources far out of proportion to the yield, accelerates soil erosion, affects world food supply and will be changing in the future.

"If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million," David Pimentel, professor of ecology in Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, reported at the July 24-26 meeting of the Canadian Society of Animal Science in Montreal. Or, if those grains were exported, it would boost the U.S. trade balance by $80 billion a year, Pimentel estimated.
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Animal protein production requires more than eight times as much fossil-fuel energy than production of plant protein while yielding animal protein that is only 1.4 times more nutritious for humans than the comparable amount of plant protein, according to the Cornell ecologist's analysis.
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Animal agriculture is a leading consumer of water resources in the United States, Pimentel noted. Grain-fed beef production takes 100,000 liters of water for every kilogram of food.