How Much Land Does Animal Agriculture Take Up

This fascinating map from National Geographic shows the proportion of the earth'southward crops that are grown for straight man consumption (in green) versus all the crops that are grown for beast feed or biofuels (in purple):

Crops grown for food (green) versus for animate being feed and fuel (purple)

Click to enlarge. (National Geographic)

Merely 55 percent of the world'south crop calories are actually eaten directly past people. Another 36 percent is used for animal feed. And the remaining nine percentage goes toward biofuels and other industrial uses. (Those figures come up from this newspaper past Emily Cassidy and other researchers at the University of Minnesota'south Institute on the Environment.)

The proportions are even more striking in the United states, where just 27 percent of ingather calories are consumed directly — wheat, say, or fruits and vegetables grown in California. By contrast, more than 67 pct of crops — especially all the soy grown in the Midwest — goes to animal feed. And a portion of the residuum goes to ethanol and other biofuels.

Some of that animal feed eventually becomes nutrient, obviously — but it'southward a much, much more indirect procedure. It takes about 100 calories of grain to produce only 12 calories of chicken or 3 calories worth of beefiness, for example.

Then why does this map matter?

The map itself comes from Jonathan Foley'south fascinating, visually rich exploration in National Geographic of how we can perhaps feed everyone as the world's population grows from 7 billion today to 9 billion by mid-century. (Foley directs the University of Minnesota's Plant on the Environment.)

Feeding nine billion people won't be easy: that'southward basically like calculation two new Indias to the world in the next few decades. And, making matters fifty-fifty trickier, humans take now cultivated most of the globe's arable land and are pushing up against the limits of freshwater consumption. So the traditional strategy of "discover new farmland to grow more food" is getting even harder.

There are lots of possible strategies hither. Farmers could increment agricultural productivity by boosting crop yields — either through new farming techniques or through improved ingather genetics. Only fifty-fifty if the rapid rate of improvement in crop yields over the 20th century continued, that still wouldn't produce enough food for everyone.

Another possibility, every bit the map to a higher place shows, is that the world could devote more than existing farmland back to feeding people. Again, as the numbers propose, merely 55 percent of ingather calories go directly toward people. The rest goes toward biofuels or animal feed.Humans tin can't eat biofuels, obviously. And beast feed is also an inefficient way of feeding people — virtually i-tenth equally efficient, on a calorie basis, equally eating crops straight.

One implication of that is that, as countries similar China and India grow and consume more milk and meat, the pressure level on global farmland will abound. But, alternatively, if the globe shifted even a modest portion of its nutrition away from resource-intensive meats or grew fewer biofuels, we could wring more nutrient calories out of existing farmland.

At that place are other strategies besides, which Foley details in his piece. Many countries still don't farm as efficiently every bit they could due to insufficient fertilizer utilise. And a lot of food still gets wasted, either by consumers or due to poor storage infrastructure. In August 2014, one of Foley'south colleagues, Paul W, published a newspaper in Science showing that farming tweaks in just a handful of countries could prepare a lot of these inefficiencies.

Further reading: How to feed iii billion extra people — without trashing the planet

Source: https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel-animal-feed

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