Factory Farming Is Destroying Our Environment

According to the US Department of Agriculture nearly 10 BILLION animals are raised and killed for food each year in the United States alone. 

While there are multiple reasons for you to start cutting factory farmed animals out of your diet, one of the most important reasons is one that is not often talked or thought about -the destructive toll that is taken on the environment from the mass production and consumption of factory farmed animals and animal products. 

It’s interesting how this aspect is, for the most part, entirely overlooked. No one ever really stops to think about how much land and resources are actually needed to produce enough animals and products to cater to the excessive over-consumption of animals across the globe.

Just think about how much these animals need to eat and drink, feeding 10 Billion animals in the US alone is considerably more than feeding the entire planet. 

Currently according to the UN, raising animals and producing the feed for them uses 30% of the Earth’s land mass- wow.

While doing research for this article I have come across some staggering statistics to support this environmental issue.

260 Million Acres (and counting) of US forests have been clear-cut to create land for producing feed for livestock.

70% Of the grain that is produced in the US is fed to farm animals Scientists at the Smithsonian Institution have stated that the equivalent of SEVEN football fields of land is bulldozed every single minute to create more land for farming animals.

2,400 Gallons of water is needed to produce 1 pound of meat, only 25 gallons is needed to produce 1 pound of wheat. You would save more water by not showering for 6 months than you would by eating a pound of meat!

In the 2004-2005 crop season all the wild animals and trees in over 2.9 million acres of the Amazon Rain forest in Brazil were destroyed in order to grow crops to produce feed for chickens and other factory farmed animals.

Close to half of all water used in the USA goes to the production of animals for food.

A United Nations report from 2006 states that animal agriculture is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” 

The EPA reports that roughly 80 percent of ammonia emissions in the US come from animal waste. Atmospheric ammonia can disrupt aquatic ecosystems, ruin soil quality, damage crops, and jeopardize human health. Cows and sheep are responsible for 37% of the total methane (23 times as warming as CO2) generated by human activity.