Vegiterians?!
Vegiterians?
i need a website with statistics like how much land it takes to produce a pound of meat vs the amount of land to produce grain... or water, how much water to raise an animal vs a crop. i want numbers!!!
Answers:
Improving Personal Health
It's no secret that compared to average meat-eaters, vegetarians generally live longer, are less likely to be overweight, suffer far fewer incidences of cancer and heart disease, and have more energy. These facts have been consistently borne out by decades of scientific research. The largest epidemiological study ever conducted (the China-Oxford-Cornell study) concluded that those eating the amount of animal foods in a typical American diet have seventeen times the death rate from heart disease, and, for women, five times the rate of breast cancer, than those who get 5% or less of their protein from animal foods. (See the references at the end of this article.)
Meat contains 14 times the amount of pesticides as plant foods, since pesticides get concentrated as they move up through the food chain, and since they're more easily stored in fatty tissues. In 1980, six years after the pesticide dieldrin was banned, the USDA destroyed two million packages of frozen turkey products contaminated with dieldrin. (And such contamination can routinely occur without detection.) In 1974, the FDA found dieldrin in 85% of all dairy products and 99.5% of the American people. The EPA discovered that the breast milk of vegetarian women contained far lower levels of pesticides than that of average Americans. A study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine found that "The highest levels of contamination in the breast milk of the vegetarians was lower than the lowest level of contamination…(in) non-vegetarian women… The mean vegetarian levels were only 1-2% as high as the average levels in the U.S."
Saving the Earth
All food animals consume several times more grain than they produce as meat. So several times as much land is needed to grow grain to feed animals, several times as much energy is used to harvest the grain and transport it, several times as much water is necessary, several times as much pesticides, etc. Worldwide petroleum reserves would be exhausted in 11 years if the rest of the world ate like the U.S. The least energy-efficient plant food is 10 times as efficient as the most efficient meat food. A nationwide switch to a pure vegetarian diet would allow us to cut our oil imports by 60%.
Over half of the water used in the U.S. is used to grow feed for livestock. It takes 100 times as much water to produce meat than to produce wheat. The water required to produce a day's diet for a typical American is 4,000 gallons. (It's 1,200 for vegetarians and 300 for vegans.) Compared to a vegan diet, three days of a typical American diet requires as much water as you use for showering all year (assuming you shower every day).
U.S. Livestock produce 250,000 pounds of waste per second -- 20 times as much as humans. A large feedlot produces as much waste as a large city, but without a sewage system. Animal waste washed into rivers and lakes causes increased nitrates, phosphates, ammonia, and bacteria, and decreases the oxygen content. This kills plant and animal life. The meat industry account for three times as much harmful organic waste as the rest of the industries in the U.S. combined.
It takes ten times as much land to produce food for an average American compared to a pure vegetarian. An acre of land can produce 20,000 pounds of potatoes, but only 165 pounds of beef. In the U.S., 260 million acres of forest have been destroyed for use as agricultural land to support our meat diet (over 1 acre per person). Since 1967, the rate of deforestation has been one acre every five seconds. For every acre cleared for urban development, seven acres are cleared to graze animals or grow feed for them.
Around 85% of topsoil loss is directly associated with raising livestock. We have lost 75% of our topsoil. The USDA says crop productivity is down 70% as a result of topsoil loss. It takes nature 500 years to build an inch of topsoil. Vegan diets make less than 5% of the demands on the soil as meat-based diets.
Caring for Animals
Around eight billion animals are killed for food every year in the U.S. alone -- a number greater than the entire human population of the planet. Each meat-eating American eats the equivalent of about 24 animals per year. What's worse, modern agricultural methods mean that animals are raised in cramped confinement operations instead of the pastures from childhood picture books -- a practice known as factory farming. Chickens are crammed into cages with no free space, and are debeaked to keep them from pecking each other to death. Animals are pumped full of various powerful drugs to kill diseases resulting from filthy living conditions, and to make them grow or produce faster than nature intended. When cows and chickens stop producing as much milk and eggs as the younger animals, they're unceremoniously slaughtered and made into low-grade meat (fast food and pet food). For some, vegetarianism and veganism are ways to refuse to participate in the commodification of animals.
Source(s):
http://michaelbluejay.com/veg/why.html...
go to http://www.notmilk.com all the imformation vegetarian need on the environment, health benifits or animal crualty is on this site.
hmmm... thats a difficult question...
I can't remember the source, but It takes 3.5 hectares to provide food for a meat based diet & .5 hectares for a plant based diet for the same amount of food.
It uses more, yes, but actually, not that much more food could be grown were all the animals farms in the world to be turned into crop farms. Most of the land used for animals would be unsuitable for crops, or at least give too poor a yield to make it worthwhile. This is because crops need a certain climate, relief (they can't grow on steep land, whereas animals can still graze) and quality of soil. In most of the land used for pastoral farming these factors just aren't good enough to mean much more food could be grown there.
Less meat can be got from a field as if it were used for growing crops, but this is because crop farming is very intensive in comparison. While animals need a lot of space to run around and graze, plants don't and a field can be practically packed to the rafters. This of course is more straining on the soil than meat and worse for local wildlife, as at least they can still live in a field full of cows, whereas they can't in a field of crops, not least due to the chemicals sprayed upon it.
Also, meat uses more water than grain. Well rice uses several times more water than that. Does this mean we should stop eating rice? No, of course not, and this particular argument against meat is terrible for exactly the same reasons.
The conclusions based on these argument by vegetarianst are that meat production is wasteful and more food could be grown if it didn't exist and thus solve orld hunger. This is completely false. Not keeping animals wouldn't be able to solve world hunger, even though more food could be grown on that land. The thing is there is already enough food to feed the world several times over, and huge amounts go to waste every day. The reason world hunger exists is that people can't afford it. Also, giving a country free food would destroy their economy. No one would buy the locally grown stuff, if there was free food around, and the food industry and the millions employed by it would all go bankrupt with no one buying their stock.