I think everyone who is awake and reading is getting the point related to the environmental impacts of corporate animal husbandry practices. I am not referring to locally grown and consumed free range meat products. I do want to be clear however, I could spend the next two weeks waxing on about the negative consequences of a meat eating diet from the ecological perspective. The toxic marine organism Pfisteria and its relationship to intensive hog farrming practices on the east coast is worthy of a couple blog nights alone. Nonetheless, this is my last environmental aspects and impacts hurrah.

Some meat eating fun facts for the USA:

• 41% of all irrigated crop land is used to feed livestock
• 17 trillion gallons of water is used on the crops simply to feed livestock
• It takes 5 times as much water to grow crops to feed farm animals as it does to grow fruits and vegetables.
• 4,500 gallons of water is consumed in producing ¼ pound of raw beef
• 1 pound of fertilizer is required to produce 3 pounds of beef
• 22 billion pounds of fertilizer is used annually to grow feed grains for American livestock
• The amount of fertilizer used in support of livestock food is sufficient to provide energy for 1 million Americans for an entire year
• 35 gallons of oil is consumed bringing one cow to market using CAFO approaches.

Tomorrow: Ethical Considerations of Vegetarianism

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 9:55 pm and is filed under Vegetarian Challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.