Summary
Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture, with most of this used to raise livestock for dairy and meat. Livestock are fed from two sources – lands on which the animals graze and land on which feeding crops, such as soy and cereals, are grown. How much would our agricultural land use decline if the world adopted a plant-based diet?
Research suggests that if everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops. The research also shows that cutting out beef and dairy (by substituting chicken, eggs, fish or plant-based food) has a much larger impact than eliminating chicken or fish.
They aren’t useless. It can often be useful to know what the extremes are, as a middle-ground approach would lie somewhere in between. Like, if switching wholly away from animals would free up 3 billion hectares, would switching about halfway free up about 1.5 billion hectares?
Obviously it’s not necessarily that simple but still, knowing the statistics at various extremes allows you to weigh your options, so you can compromise by combining various approaches at varying degrees and hopefully get a “good enough” outcome. The researchers here aren’t necessarily saying “all you meat lovers need to just give up meat already, look at how much land we can free up!”, rather they’re saying “hey policymakers, if we reduce our reliance on animals by around a third, we can free up a billion hectares of valuable agricultural land.”