What’s new to me in this data is that the increase in cropland for humans for a vegan diet is still less that what we currently feed to animals in spite of the enormous amount of pasture they also require.
except that the food that is fed to livestock is largely crop seconds or parts of crops that people can’t or won’t eat. so we need to find a whole other use for those parts of the plants or accept it as waste.
I know a lot of people who grow feed on prime agricultural land. Like, can you eat alfalfa? Have you ever tried feed varieties of maize?
people definitely eat alfalfa sprouts. to be clear, i didn’t say no land is used explicitly for feed, but much of the land that is used for growing feed is actually growing some crop that will produce multiple products, with feed being only one of them.
Or we can use it as compost, which we should be moving towards producing and using instead of manure as fertilizer for a lot of our agriculture. That way it doesn’t go to waste even if it does get ‘thrown out’.
