The Enviornment

I'd like to try to touch on various aspects and reasons why people start to feel compelled to become vegetarian or vegan. One of those reasons is the impact that the meat industry has on our environment and world hunger thus far.

-The federal US government subsidizes 35% of feed crop production and US taxpayers paid $56 billion on corn subsidies over the last 12 years. 80% of this corn is used for farm animal feed. Without these subsidies, industrial farming would be inefficient and much too expensive for producers and consumers.

According to scientists at the Smithsonian Institution:

-Seven football fields worth of land is bulldozed every minute to create more room for farmed animals and the crops that feed them.

- Of all the agricultural land in the U.S., 80% is used to raise animals for food and grow grain to feed them which is almost half the total land mass of the lower 48 states.

- In the “finishing” phase alone, in which pigs grow from 100lbs to 240lbs, each hog consumes more than 500lbs of grain, corn, and soybeans; meaning in the US, pigs eat tens of millions of tons of feed every year.

-Chickens, pigs, cattle, and other animals raised for food are the primary consumers of water in the US----EX: a single pig consumes 21 gallons of drinking water per day, while a cow on a dairy farm drinks as much as 50 gallons daily.

-It takes more than 2,400 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of cow flesh, whereas it takes about 180 gallons of water to make 1 pound of whole wheat flour

According to the United Nations:

-a global shift toward a vegan diet is one of the steps necessary to combat the worst effects of climate change

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

-Reports that roughly 80 percent of ammonia emissions in the U.S. come from animal waste.

-Each day, factory farms produce billions of pounds of manure, which ends up in lakes, rivers, and drinking water. Farmed animals produce about 130 times as much excrement as does the entire human population of the United States—87,000 pounds of waste per second!


Disclaimer: This is a personal blog, these are my opinions, I am not a doctor, nor a specialist.