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Two simple questions reveal how much land we could save by eating plants. Almost everyone guesses wrong
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this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2026
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So genuine question as someone who didn't eat meat for 10 years: If we're talking a purely efficient approach to this, then while 100% plant based is better than the current model wouldn't there be more efficient models than that? For example insect farms fed by plant waste, continuing to fish sustainably under the plant farming model, and having free range chickens as pets and eating their eggs. I'm curious how vegans would even view this. Like is a bacterial vat that produces calories vegan? Are insects permissible? And then the chicken eggs. If you keep your own chickens and treat them good, and let them run free range, and just take the extra eggs, is that permissible to vegans? If not then why not? Genuinely curious.
I'm also curious if these models take the Haber-Bosch process into account. Because most of our plant based agriculture currently is supported by it. I'm of the strong belief that industrial agriculture is entirely untenable without it, and we'd have to switch to a food forest model, which would actually be MORE land efficient for the same calories. And since that process is reliant on the fossil fuel industry it is always going to be unstable. So it really needs to be phased out of wide use in the food supply chain. It's a famine waiting to happen.
This is an interesting exercise, but I fail to see what problem it seeks to solve. We don't have a food scarcity. We wildly over-produce food. We already cannot eat all the food we produce. We feed most of it to animals because that is a way of refining cheap abundant food in to expensive scarce luxury products.
What we actually need are industrial and commercial processes that consume as much food as livestock presently does, but gives better financial returns. Boom, instant global veganism.
That's actually not true. We do have food scarcity. Just not yet in most of the world. You see, our current food production models, especially meat production but also plant food production, are highly unsustainable. It is very likely we will enter into a global famine that wipes out most of the human population sometime in the next couple centuries. It could be much sooner, could be near the end of that, but it will happen if we continue as we are now. That is because the way we farm currently uses far too much non-renewable water sources (aquifers for example), fertilizer that comes from non renewable sources (derived from fossil fuels), and land that is having its soil drained of nutrients. Veganism alone does not fix these problems. It can make them easier to solve in many cases because we waste less resources on cattle, but cattle is also only so wasteful because of HOW we use it. Back in medieval times cattle was a way to turn useless land (grazing land not suitable for crops) into calories. They'd have a small herd and let it free range. This was a boon of calories not a drain. And meat was rare to consume as a living cow makes milk and is much more valuable than a dead cow. Same with chickens and eggs. Even pigs produced useful manure for fertilizing. So while they did slaughter and eat them it wasn't the sole purpose of raising those animals. And the animals made their lives possible through their byproducts.
I would say that the goal of any vegan should be to find a way for us to live in harmony with animals and the environment. Because we aren't just talking about farm animals, and humans don't just harm animals for food. Our farming practices destroy their natural habitats as well. Even if we ate only plants if we do not find a more sustainable way to farm animals will continue to suffer.
You're saying that if we did not rely on fossil fuels and non-renewable water sources, we would not be able to grow enough food to feed the humans, let alone their livestock?
Not using the current methods of farming atleast.
Methods that, of course, were specifically selected, developed, and intensified to exploit those cheap but unsustainable available means. Do you want to make a claim about the sustainable agricultural capacity of the Earth? It sounds as though you are at least suggesting it could be insufficient to support currently living humans.
It does not matter how much the sustainable agriculture can support, nor do we know the answer to that question, because we will not have the simple luxury to change over. These unsustainable systems will not slowly degrade. They will reach a point of collapse. Not only does this mean we will not have TIME to switch over to sustainable agriculture, but the very unsustainable methods themselves reduce the sustainable capacity of the planet. Each day as ecological damage progresses the carrying capacity of the Earth diminishes. It's not some miraculous cure to switch to sustainable methods. The planet will need decades, if not centuries, to recover from the damage we have done to it already.
On top of this the most sustainable form of agriculture is food forestry as it mimics a natural ecosystem, but food forests cannot simply be grown in a season. They must be cultivated for generations to reach their full potential. That is what the Native Americans did. I have walked the remnants of those very food forests myself and they still have food in them today after centuries of neglect. After their caretakers were wiped out or displaced.
We have essentially locked ourselves in to an unsustainable system. It would take a huge amount of time and a huge amount of effort to begin to right the course and even then it may not be enough to prevent a global famine. This isn't a question with an easy answer.
as a vegan, i generally view the things you say as much less bad than our current animal farming industry, and maybe some of them could be done ethically. but given my general experience with humans as a species, i just can't trust any human organizations to run those things ethically, so it's simpler and safer to avoid animal products entirely.
I mean, I hope you understand that vegans will not be experts in non-vegan solutions. I'm certainly not an expert.
But generally speaking: The only thing that produces calories on this planet are plants. Everything else is always just reusing those calories and therefore using up some of those calories to sustain its own life.
Yes, in principle there can be situations where introducing a middleman can make more calories available to us. Animals grazing on land where farming isn't viable is the classic example.
Having insects eat plant waste could be viable, although turning plant waste into compost as an alternative to fertilizer is also already quite useful.
But then you run into the other problem, which is that the scalability of plants is hard to beat. For the most part, you throw seeds onto barren land and the magic happens. You don't need VATs, you don't need personnel most of the time, you don't need electricity.
I could see certain processes being useful for certain niche situations, but so long as we can just sidestep that situation by growing plants in the next town over and transporting the food to where it's needed, I don't think, it's worth the investment.
Uh... no. As someone who has actually grown plants myself for food this is not accurate. Agriculture is hard. Soil nutritional content, acidity levels, too much or too little water depending on the plant, temperature and planting times matter, amount of sun varies by plant, some plants can be grown together and some cant, pests are a huge problem and need to be managed properly, etc. I really do encourage you to get some experience growing your own food from seed if you have the land to try it out available. It's 100% viable to do, but it's not nearly as simple as you made it sound there. Tonight part of my dinner will be a butternut squash I grew myself. It's quite fufilling.
A great example of how complex and fragile our agriculture currently is: That Haber-Bosch Process I mentioned? 40% of Global calories are made possible by it is the typical estimate. It's part of the Natural Gas -> Fertilizer supply chain.
50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber-Bosch process.
Yeah it's kinda crazy when you think about it. Imagine what would happen if natural gas ran out. But luckily that's an infinite resource that... uh... oh, right. lol
If you aren't familiar with it, I suggest checking out Bill Reese's talks on overshoot. Nice to see an actual intelligent person talk about how fucked we are as a species lol.
I'll have to give it a look. It's pretty bad yeah lol. I even saw something on here recently talking about how we're farming so much that the nutrition in our food is plummeting from low soil nutrient levels. Makes me wonder about that whole "Great Filter" question. Things are extremely bleak.
Oh man. It's way worse than you think, lol. Don't start deep diving unless you're ready to feel existential grief and probably anxiety.
The soil on the great plains used to be 12 feet thick on average, now its roughly 6 inches lol
Oh yeah if you go back further it's way worse. I was just talking about a specific study comparing soil now to like the 90s or something I think? But if you go back and read like personal journals of the colonizers who came to the Americas they'll talk about things like "You can throw a spear at a river blindly and hit 2 fish". Then them and their ancestors went on to ruin that very environment lol. Then like the Buffalo herds that used to number in the millions. It's such a shame.
Yeah we've replaced almost every large mammal with a human being in like 250 years. It's fucked lol.
Yes, I am aware that there is more to agriculture, that's why I prefaced it and followed it up with my actual point, which is that this complexity pales in comparison to the complexity of any more 'engineered' processes.
And yes, agriculture may be fragile, but we're not gonna replace it anytime soon, because we need something that scales.
Reducing the amount of plants we need to grow by going for a plant-based diet is already a step in the right direction. I don't remember the exact numbers, but we might even be able to cut out Haber-Bosch.
In particular maybe also interesting for you is that legumes can help to reduce the need for fertilizer, because they fixate nitrogen into the ground. And well, plant-based diets involve a lot of legumes.
That's why they were often part of crop rotation and also the Three Sisters.
Holy shit. Are you serious?
I was simplifying under the assumption that you guys aren't dumb and get the general point without me spelling out the exact differences.
I mean, if by simplifying you mean being wrong, sure.
Sure, @Nonconfrontational.
😘