#resource use

I think that this is one of those topics that people have not actually thought that deeply about, yet are still pretty happy to share their thoughts on… most have this idea that farmed animals are all just in fields eating grass is or hay, others who are more informed will know about things like alfalfa that humans cannot eat. Here is a short response for you:

The EU, which plans to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050, spends nearly one-third of its entire budget on CAP subsidies. “The vast majority of that is going towards products which are driving us to the brink,” said Paul Behrens, an environmental change researcher at Leiden University and co-author of the study.

Plant-based diets require less land, less water, less energy, less deforestation and produce vastly lower greenhouse gas emissions. Even accounting for land that cannot be used for crops, we could comfortably feed far more people using far less resources if we were all eating plant-based. See my resource use page for an explanation on that, and the resources subpage for sources.

Keep in mind that there is no realistic scenario where this happens immediately, either. Current projections are based on current systems, but as the world transitions away from animal agriculture, we would make plant agriculture even more efficient, less damaging to soil and more sustainable. The farming of well-chosen crops directly is almost always going to be less ecologically damaging than farming animals, who require land to graze on and land to grow the vast vast quantities of crops they are fed.

All that said, there are problems that would be created through a switch to plant agriculture. Social erosion is one of them, considering how best to manage cropland so that we can re-wild less "productive" land, how we manage fertilisation and keeping out pests etc. But all of these issues are massive under our current system too, because again, farmed animals are fed vast quantities of soy, corn and wheat to get them to slaughter weight, and then you have to add on the vast tracts of (often arable, indigenous and/or deforested) land that they graze on.

Personally, I think that a plant-based agriculture system would need to include alternative proteins as well as arable crops. That could be in the form of fermented proteins which shows a lot of promise as an emerging technology, or possibly even lab grown meat if we can get rid of the animal input and make it more efficient, though I am much less convinced of that.