Farming Jobs Are Not A Moral Defence Of Animal Agriculture
A global shift towards plant-based diets would not just change what ends up on plates. It would change the entire labour structure of farming.
That should surprise nobody.
Using animals is labour-intensive because animals resist being turned into products. They have bodies. They have needs. They move. They reproduce. They get ill. They have to be confined, fed, transported, inseminated, milked, separated, restrained, killed, cut up, packaged, and sold.
That takes labour.
Not useful labour. Not necessary labour. Labour organised around domination.
A new modelling study published in The Lancet Planetary Health looked at what would happen to agricultural labour under different food system scenarios. The researchers examined 20 food groups across 179 countries, comparing business-as-usual food demand in 2030 with shifts towards flexitarian, pescatarian, vegetarian, and vegan dietary patterns.
The results are huge.
Under business as usual, food production in 2030 would require around 383 million full-time-equivalent agricultural workers. Of that, 215 million would be needed to produce crops, which make up 82% of food by weight. Another 164 million would be needed to produce animal products, which make up just 13% of food by weight.
Animal products account for a small share of food by weight, but demand a massive share of agricultural labour.
The study found that, per 1,000 tonnes of product, animal products required around four times more labour than crops on average in 2020. This is not some mystery of economics. It is what happens when an entire food system is built around turning living beings into commodities.
A field of plants does not need to be impregnated.
A lentil does not need to have their baby taken.
A chickpea does not need to be stunned, shackled, bled out, or dismembered.
When people talk about “farming jobs” in animal agriculture, they often flatten everything into a sentimental image of rural life. A farmer leaning on a gate. A family business. A tradition. A landscape. A way of life.
What they are usually defending is paid participation in an industry built on making someone else’s body profitable.
The study found that shifting towards more plant-based dietary patterns could reduce global agricultural labour requirements by 5% under flexitarian and pescatarian scenarios, and by 22 to 28% under vegetarian and vegan dietary scenarios. That is roughly 83 to 106 million fewer full-time-equivalent workers needed under the latter models.
Cue the predictable outrage.
“What about farmers?”
Fine. What about them?
Workers should not be abandoned. Rural communities should not be thrown away. People whose livelihoods are tied to animal agriculture need serious transition support, retraining, public investment, income protection, and alternative work. That is not optional. That is what a just transition means.
But “people currently earn money from this” is not a moral argument for continuing it.
People earn money from people trafficking. People earn money from slavery. People earned money from industries we later recognised as destructive, dishonest, or indefensible. The point was never to punish workers. The point was to stop pretending the industry itself deserved protection.
Animal agriculture is no different.
If a job depends on breeding animals into existence as resources, using their bodies, taking what they produce, and killing them when the numbers say so, the answer is not to preserve that job forever. The answer is to support the person out of that role and end the system that made the role necessary.
That is the difference between defending workers and defending exploitation.
The research does not say plant-based food systems would destroy agriculture. It says labour would shift. Crop labour would rise by 8 to 25%, especially for fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, and vegetable oils. Some countries would need more agricultural workers, particularly those expanding horticulture. Others, especially countries dominated by livestock production, would need far fewer.
In other words, this is not the end of farming. It is the end of pretending that farming has to mean using animals.
The study also points to possible transition pathways. Workers could move from livestock production into horticulture, food services, transport, retail, manufacturing, construction, or nature conservation. Land no longer required for animal agriculture could be restored, and some of the people previously employed in animal production could be paid to help repair the landscapes the industry helped degrade.
That matters because the current system does not just use animals. It also traps human labour inside an industry with no future. It asks workers to keep doing physically demanding, emotionally corrosive, low-status, often precarious work so the public can keep buying products they do not need.
And then, whenever anyone suggests changing the system, the industry hides behind those workers.
It is always the same trick.
They do not care about workers when conditions are poor. They do not care about slaughterhouse staff when the work traumatises them. They do not care about migrant labourers when they are underpaid or exploited. They do not care about farmers crushed by debt, supermarkets, feed costs, disease outbreaks, or corporate control.
But the second someone challenges animal agriculture, suddenly the whole industry becomes a workers’ rights campaign.
No.
If we care about workers, we should want them out of industries built on death, domination, and ecological collapse. We should want public money used to build new systems, not prop up old ones. We should want subsidies redirected away from animal exploitation and into food security, plant-based production, rewilding, restoration, and rural renewal.
The study estimated that dietary shifts could reduce global labour costs by $790 to $995 billion under vegetarian and vegan dietary scenarios. That is not just an economic detail. That is a glimpse of how much human effort is currently being absorbed by an inefficient, destructive system that exists because culture keeps mistaking habit for necessity.
A plant-based food system would not solve everything by itself. It would still need workers’ rights. It would still need fair wages. It would still need land justice, migrant protections, public investment, and safeguards against corporate capture.
But it would remove one enormous injustice from the centre of the food system.
The animals.
Because the problem with animal agriculture is not only that it uses too much land, water, feed, labour, and public money.
The problem is that it uses animals. Everything else is a consequence of that decision.
A just transition cannot mean finding a softer way to keep animals as property. It has to mean moving workers, land, money, and political imagination away from exploitation entirely.
The future of farming does not need to be built on cages, slaughterhouses, milking parlours, hatcheries, fishing vessels, and feedlots.
It can be built on food.
Actual food.
Not someone’s body.