Non-vegans, especially farmers, often point to vegans as being responsible for causing environmental destruction by supporting large-scale monocropping. They say all the chickpeas and lentils and soy needed to feed vegans are doing this. Vegans on the other hand will say it is animal feed causing this problem. I was curious about this, so went off and did some calculations. They are very rough but it was surprising.
First up, right now, around 1.4 billion hectares are used to grow extensive "monoculture" crops such as wheat, rice, soy, barley, corn, palm oil crop and so on. Almost all of this is due to the demand for food etc from people. Very little is caused directly by plant-based diets and probably only a small percentage for animal feed.
If we could magically eliminate animal sourced food today, we'd need to replace those lost calories with plant sourced foods. As meat and dairy provide about 43% of all protein consumed by the world, we'd need a lot of protein dense plant foods. Presumably, we'd grow a lot more lentils, pulses, soy etc. On my calculations, we would reduce the land under monocultures by as little as 60-70 million hectares. That is, a plant-based diet tomorrow would reduce total land area under large scale crops by little more than 5%. While this is noticeable, it doesn't look like a plant-based diet is a good solution to the problem of monoculture cropping.
First up, right now, around 1.4 billion hectares are used to grow extensive "monoculture" crops such as wheat, rice, soy, barley, corn, palm oil crop and so on. Almost all of this is due to the demand for food etc from people. Very little is caused directly by plant-based diets and probably only a small percentage for animal feed.
If we could magically eliminate animal sourced food today, we'd need to replace those lost calories with plant sourced foods. As meat and dairy provide about 43% of all protein consumed by the world, we'd need a lot of protein dense plant foods. Presumably, we'd grow a lot more lentils, pulses, soy etc. On my calculations, we would reduce the land under monocultures by as little as 60-70 million hectares. That is, a plant-based diet tomorrow would reduce total land area under large scale crops by little more than 5%. While this is noticeable, it doesn't look like a plant-based diet is a good solution to the problem of monoculture cropping.