Animal Agriculture Is Eating the Earth

Humanity uses half of the planet’s habitable land for agriculture. Most of that land is not used to grow food for humans. It is used to graze animals or grow crops to feed them. We flatten forests, drain wetlands, degrade peatlands, and cover entire regions with monocultures. Then we feed much of what we grow to animals, kill the animals and call this an efficient food system. It is an ecological disaster held together by subsidies, political cowardice and the refusal to question humanity’s assumed entitlement to use other animals.

A major study published in Nature has modelled what could happen if the world moved towards healthier, more plant-rich diets by 2050, while improving agricultural productivity and halving food waste. The results are enormous.

Compared with continuing along the current path, agriculture-related carbon dioxide emissions from land-use change could fall by 76%. Compared with 2020, they could fall by 85%. Direct methane and nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture could fall by around a third.

Global agricultural land use would shrink. Hundreds of millions fewer cows, sheep and goats would be used for food. Tens of billions fewer chickens and pigs would be bred and killed than under business as usual.

This is not a model of global veganism. It does not propose ending the use of animals. It merely limits the consumption of animal flesh, dairy and eggs while increasing the production of vegetables, fruit, nuts and legumes. Even that would radically reshape the planet.

Feeding Humans Instead of other Animals

The study compared business as usual with a transformation built around three changes: healthier diets, improved agricultural productivity and a 50% reduction in food loss and waste. Under business as usual, animal numbers continue rising. More land is cultivated. More fertiliser is used. More greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere.

Under the transformation scenario, animal agriculture contracts and a greater share of crops goes directly to humans instead of being diverted into animal feed.

Animals are not machines capable of converting every calorie they consume into food for humans. They use energy to breathe, move, maintain their bodies and stay alive. Much of the nutritional value in animal feed never reaches a human plate. Growing crops to feed animals so humans can eat their bodies adds an unnecessary and wasteful stage to the food system.

The study found that agricultural production would be 17% lower than under business as usual, largely because less animal feed and fewer animal products would be produced. But the overall value of agricultural production would remain roughly comparable with 2020. In other words, humanity could feed a larger population without endlessly expanding agriculture. We could simply stop wasting so much land and food on animals.

The Industry That Would Shrink

The economic value of animal agriculture would fall by 60% compared with business as usual, dropping from a projected $2.2 trillion to $870 billion. The industry will present this as a threat. It is a threat. To them.

For the climate, wildlife, forests, rivers and animals imprisoned on farms, it is an opportunity.

The value of vegetable, fruit, nut and legume production would increase by 23%. Their share of agricultural output would rise from 34% under business as usual to 58% in the transformed system. This is not the destruction of farming. It is a transition from using vast amounts of land to breed and feed animals towards growing food for humans.

Some rural economies have been built around animal agriculture, and workers should not be abandoned. Governments have spent decades paying farmers to maintain destructive systems. They can pay them to leave those systems. Public money could support farmers to grow legumes, vegetables, fruit, nuts and grains for direct human consumption. It could fund habitat restoration, peatland recovery, woodland expansion and new plant-based industries.

The choice is not between preserving every existing animal farm and condemning rural communities to poverty. The choice is whether governments manage the transition fairly or continue delaying until ecological collapse forces a much more brutal one.

Soya Is Not the Problem

Nowhere is the waste of feeding crops to animals clearer than in Brazil. Soya cultivation has expanded across the Amazon and Cerrado, covering more than half of Brazil’s arable land. Nearly 80% of soya beans are used to feed animals in agriculture and aquaculture. This expansion is commonly blamed on vegans eating tofu. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of soya is not eaten directly by humans. It is fed to cows, pigs, chickens and farmed fish. Demand for animal flesh drives demand for animal feed. Even when soya is planted on land previously cleared for cattle grazing, it can still push destruction deeper into the forest. Mechanised crop farms take over pasture, cattle ranching moves into previously untouched areas and land prices rise in anticipation of future deforestation.

The damage does not end at the edge of the plantation.

Expanding soya production creates pressure for more roads, railways, ports, storage facilities and dredged rivers. Nearly 95% of Amazon deforestation in Brazil occurs within three miles of highways. Every mile of major road can generate many more miles of secondary roads, spreading forest clearance and degradation even further.

Communities become surrounded by plantations. Residents report tasting clouds of pesticides, followed by tingling skin, dizziness and difficulty breathing. This is what the alleged efficiency of animal agriculture looks like from the ground.

Forests are not being destroyed because humanity lacks enough farmland. Brazil already has vast areas of previously deforested land. Forests are destroyed because an expanding industry demands more land, more feed and more infrastructure.

Britain Pays for Destruction

The same basic failure can be seen in Britain’s uplands.

On Dartmoor, only 0.1% of surveyed protected land was found to be in an ecologically favourable condition. Blanket bogs and heathlands have been damaged by drainage, peat extraction, burning and grazing.

Sheep continue eating the remaining vegetation and preventing habitats from recovering. This activity is not even economically viable on its own. Each ewe grazed on the Dartmoor commons reportedly loses the farmer £16.90.

The public pays to keep it going.

More than £32 million was paid to Dartmoor commoners through environmental stewardship schemes over a decade. Not one common improved. Many became worse. This land also makes a minimal contribution to food production. Dartmoor is within the least productive 20% of English farmland, which produces less than 3% of England’s food. We are subsidising a loss-making industry to damage protected habitats while pretending this is necessary for food security.

It is difficult to design a more absurd system.

Restored blanket bogs could store carbon, reduce flooding and support wildlife. Instead, taxpayers fund sheep grazing that degrades them.

Animal agriculture is defended as an essential use of the countryside even when it produces little food, loses money and destroys the very landscape the public is supposedly paying to protect.

The Largest Land Recovery in 2,000 Years

Under the transformation model, agricultural land could contract by 274 million hectares by 2050.

The researchers describe this as the largest absolute reduction in agricultural land in more than 2,000 years. Grazing land would fall by 10% compared with 2020. Some cropland would expand to produce more fruit, vegetables, nuts and legumes, but total agricultural land would still shrink.

There would be more than 400 million fewer cows, sheep and goats used for flesh than in 2020, and 800 million fewer than under business as usual. There would also be 32 billion fewer pigs and chickens than under business as usual. Every number represents living individuals who would not be bred into confinement and slaughter. Fewer animals means fewer forests cleared for feed. Less grazing pressure. Lower methane emissions. Less manure. Less fertiliser. Less water consumed by a system designed to turn plants into animal products.

It also means less suffering.

The environmental argument and the animal rights argument are not competing concerns. They point towards the same conclusion because the same industry is responsible for both forms of destruction.

Business as Usual Is the Expensive Option

Defenders of animal agriculture often frame transition as a reckless experiment. Business as usual is the experiment.

It asks whether humanity can continue expanding an inefficient food system on a finite planet while temperatures rise, habitats collapse and billions of animals are bred into lives of exploitation.

The current food system already produces around a third of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions by conservative calculations. It is helping push the planet beyond multiple ecological boundaries. A third of food is lost or wasted. Poor diets contribute to millions of premature deaths.

Governments continue subsidise animal agriculture, build infrastructure around it and protect it from meaningful change. The Nature study warns that powerful industries are likely to resist, block or co-opt transformation. Of course they will. A system worth trillions will not dismantle itself because the evidence says it should. It will demand weaker targets, longer deadlines, more public money and technological distractions that allow animal numbers to remain high. It will promise lower-emission cows, more efficient feed and marginally less destructive farms.

Anything except fewer animals.

But fewer animals are the central reason this model produces such enormous gains. The future food system does not require more efficient exploitation. It requires a drastic reduction in the number of animals bred, confined and killed. Even a cautious, “flexitarian” model could cut land-use emissions by 76%, release vast areas of land and prevent tens of billions of animals from entering the farming system.

Imagine what we could achieve if we stopped treating animal exploitation as an unavoidable part of food production.

The problem is not that humanity cannot feed everyone.

The problem is that we are feeding the planet to animals.