Eating for the Planet Part 2: Land Use
by Climate Leader, David Gladson
How does what we eat contribute to climate change? In our last article we looked at how converting plant food into animal food requires us to grow more food and increases the carbon emissions from farming activities. Today we’ll look at how land use also contributes to climate change and how not eating meat can help.
Land Use: The largest store of carbon on our planet is in our soils in the form of organic matter, and that organic matter is what gives our soils life. Plants, animals, insects, and microbes work together in an coordinated symphony to turn sunlight into sugar and unlock the minerals we need from the dirt. When left undisturbed, or managed well in regenerative agriculture, the soil is our number one ally in our fight to clean up the atmosphere.
The animals we eat eat a lot of food themselves, which increases the amount of land we need to farm. Growing food to feed to animals doubles the amount of agricultural land we use. Conventional agriculture produces a lot of food per acre of land, but at a high cost to the environment. It releases the soil carbon into the atmosphere, which is bad in and of itself. But this also reduces the land’s ability to grow crops for the next year. Farmers either rely on chemical fertilizers (which burn a lot of fossil fuels to produce), or they must convert new land into farmland, driving deforestation. By eating meat and animals products in the quantities we do, we drive deforestation and carbon emissions.
It is possible to raise animals in ways that don’t contribute to environmental destruction. For example, silvopasture is a farming technique that raises cattle in a forest environment. When done right, the cattle can actually contribute to the forest storing more soil carbon. But, we could not raise enough animals using these techniques to meet our current demands for meat. Switching to regenerative agriculture would require us to reduce our meat consumption by over 90%. Either we all need to drastically reduce the amount of meat and animals products we consume, or we need a whole lot of people to go vegan.
Raising animals to eat in conventional farms requires more farmland, driving deforestation. Furthermore, conventional farming damages the soil, causing farmers to seek new farmland (and more deforestation) or to use large quantities of artificial fertilizers and pesticides.
The simplest solution to this cycle is to consume less meat and animals products. It is possible to raise a small amount of meat and dairy in ways that don’t contribute to climate change, but not anywhere near the quantities we currently consume.
In our next article, we’ll talk about how the waste products from animal agriculture further contribute to climate change. Stay tuned!