Crop Deaths

Vegans Should Be Congratulated, Not Criticised

~ Graeme M ~ Leave a comment

(Four minute read)

I’m sure you are familiar with the outrage vegan advocacy so often draws on social media. One of the most curious complaints (which is everywhere these days) is the suggestion that vegans are really the biggest culprits when it comes to causing harm to other animals. Say what? This is quite the odd claim when you think about it. As a philosophy, veganism is committed to doing what we can to be fair to other animals, so by its very nature you’d imagine the ethics guide us to avoid harming other animals whenever we can.

The criticism seems pretty wide of the mark but OK, what if vegans really are doing a worse job than most? How would we know? Well, it depends a little on exactly what critics are getting at and usually they are restricting their criticism to just one thing – that more animals are killed to eat a vegan-friendly plants-only diet than an everyday diet. If – so the story goes – if you want to cause the most harm to animals, be a vegan and expect crops to be grown to feed you and see just how many wild animals are killed for your food. We’ve all seen the rant from John Dutton (played by Kevin Costner) in Yellowstone and repeated on the Joe Rogan show. What we should be doing is eating grass-fed beef, where just one animal is killed for our food each year.

Seems legit. Except… it’s wrong. In reality, nearly everyone is not doing that at all. They are actually eating plenty of plants (eg fruit, vegetables, grains, seeds, nuts, sugar and derived foods such as bread, cakes, beer, wine and so on). Plus, they are eating quite a few animals, most of which are raised in “factory farm” conditions and also require crops grown to feed them.

Yes, it might be possible to adopt a super restrictive diet and eat nothing but beef from range-grazed cattle that are not supplementally fed. But who is going to do that and why should they? People like dietary diversity and nutritionists recommend we eat a mix of plants and animals. What might be more illuminating is whether or not on average a vegan-friendly diet is way worse than an everyday diet in the number of animals killed.

Now, I’ve tackled that question a few times before so I’m not going to go back over it. You can read one of those articles here. However, the bottom line is that more animals are killed to produce food for an everyday diet than for a vegan-friendly diet, so if you care about that fact you should be congratulating vegans for trying to make a difference. Yes, that’s right – if you do care enough about other animals that you think we should source food in ways that reduce harm to other animals, a vegan-friendly diet is a very good way to do that.

But it gets better. Veganism and animal rights are a far broader ethics than just what people eat. In fact, veganism asks us to be fair to animals whenever our actions affect them and the aim is to prevent using and exploiting them and being cruel to them when we can choose to do that. Vegans try not to support activities that use, abuse or otherwise harm animals. For example, vegans (and indeed, anyone that adopts the ethics and is guided by those principles) will typically not buy products from animal farming nor from companies that routinely test on animals, they don’t support animal circuses and often-times zoos, they don’t support commercial animal entertainments such as horse racing and so on.

If anyone is making an effort to make life better for other animals, it’s vegans. Sure, plenty of people try to be kind to animals and that’s great. We all want that. However, veganism is an ethical framework specifically aimed at delivering fairness and justice for other animals, so when people criticise veganism and vegans you can tell they aren’t genuine in wanting us to do better for other animals. If they were, they’d adopt the ethics themselves and help encourage vegans (and everyone else) to make the best choices they can. Of course, vegans might get things wrong here and there, but it would be hard to prove that they actually are doing worse than the everyday consumer.

In the end, it seems very difficult to sustain the argument that vegans are somehow doing worse than most. John Dutton is simply wrong.

Really, vegans are the people trying to make a difference. They ought to be congratulated, not criticised.

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One further thought before we leave this discussion. Critics often don’t realise just how little land is needed to grow enough food for a person to eat a vegan-friendly, plant-based diet. As mentioned above research suggests such a diet needs as little as around 0.13-0.17 hectares of cropland per year. Let’s use 0.15 hectares as an average requirement. But what does this really mean?

Critics usually want to say that some vast number of animals are killed to grow crops and of course that’s true, but that is because we use crops to feed people, the animals they eat, to produce vegetable oils, biofuels, other industrial applications and clothing. And we do that for 8 billion people in a capitalist market economy. Of course the scale is vast.

But what about at the personal level where the vegan rubber hits the road, so to speak. Well, when it comes to animals killed to produce plant-based foods, we don’t really know. There have been many estimates, and one of the highest I have ever seen came from Professor Mike Archer who claimed that in Australia, about 100 mice are killed on every hectare of wheat production. Archer based this estimate on the numbers of mice killed during mouse plagues in wheat fields. While we can’t extrapolate from this what the cost is to produce other crops, we might assume that averaged overall, the 100 wild animals killed per hectare of crops is not far from the truth. We should note that this means some 2.5 billion wild animals are killed on Australian croplands (excluding invertebrates) each year, which does seem unlikely (see example number 3 below).

That claim has since been discredited, but let’s assume he’s right and use his numbers of 100 to look at some estimates about what that means for a vegan-friendly diet. First up, we can see that if a vegan-friendly diet uses 0.15 hectares of land, just 15 animals are killed in a year for that diet. This is rather less than the 50-100 animals killed for an everyday diet.

What about some specific food-related cases? Let’s look at three, using Professor Archer’s 100 animals killed on a hectare of cropland.

Plant milks. Oat and soy milk production requires growing oats and soy. It turns out that about one hectare of these crops can return about 20-30,000 liters of “milk”. If that’s so, and the average person consumes about 100 liters of milk in a year, then their share of any wild animal deaths is about 0.004 of the hectare’s production. That could mean that about one-half of a wild animal is killed for a year’s oat milk. By the way, it’s worth noting that a hectare of land used to produce dairy milk delivers around 6,500 litres of milk.

Update: It’s been pointed out that while in some places (eg New Zealand, the US) a hectare of oats can produce maybe 30,000 litres of “milk”, in Australia the quantity is closer to 6,500 litres. Also, while the average per capita milk consumption is about 100 litres in a year, many people consume as much as 300 litres. So to be fair, we can ask what that changes in the the Australian context. The answer is that a typical oat milk drinker might need about .05 hectares of oats grown. At 100 wild animals killed per hectare, that means the death toll will be about five.

Sugar cane. Much is made by some critics of vegans eating sugar and causing animals to be killed for a taste sensation and this is true. Vegans should be mindful that wild animals are killed to produce sugar (and other foods), so reducing consumption of such foods is more consistent with the goal of preventing cruelty. But does that make much of a difference? I don’t think so, to be honest. Consider, typical sugar yields in Australia are about 12,000 kg/hectare/year. The average person eats about 25kg of added sugar in a year. That suggests that just 0.002 of a hectare is needed for one person’s sugar consumption, which at 100 wild animal deaths per hectare translates to about one-fifth of an animal killed for my added sugar intake. It’s hard to think that not eating sugar can have much of an effect on my personal toll.

Wild native animals. This is an interesting claim – millions of native animals are killed to grow crops, with critics referring to all sorts of animals. But do we have any genuine empirical estimates? I’m not aware of many. In Tasmania, estimates suggest about one million wild natives are killed each year on croplands (see here). It’s likely other animals are killed too, but how many? Let’s assume the same number. So, two million wild animals killed on Tasmania’s croplands each year. There are approximately 60,000 hectares of crops harvested each year in Tasmania, which could mean that as many as 35 wild animals are killed per hectare per year in Tasmania. If a vegan diet needs about 0.15 hectares, then the death toll of wild animals is around five. Again, this is easily dwarfed by the 50-100 animals killed to feed someone a typical everyday non-vegan diet.

Truth Bomb! Is JD Garland Right that Veganism is THE Most Harmful Thing We Can Do?

~ Graeme M ~ 1 Comment

JD Garland is a Youtuber who criticises vegans and veganism, largely on the grounds that veganism is a toxic religion rather than a genuine moral philosophy. His favoured tactic is to claim that a wholly plant-based diet is far more harmful to animals than any other diet. Unfortunately he rather misrepresents veganism – it’s a moral philosophy together with supporting ethical principles which is constrained by both real world conditions and personal willingness – so his criticisms frequently address strawman arguments.

In his latest two videos, “New! Crop Deaths Proof Veganism is a Lie” parts 1 and 2 he hopes to provide yet more evidence for his claim that veganism is really BAD. The following short critique responds to his basic argument.

Garland claims that because a vegan-friendly, plants-only diet requires crops to be grown AND many animals are killed to grow these crops, such a diet is maximally harmful and worse for animals than any other diet. In particular he argues that a vegan diet requires far more crops to be grown than is the case now.

While this is the overall flavour of these videos, Garland’s main contentions here are that most crops are NOT grown for animal feed and that a vegan diet is not cruelty free, ie that vegans are also responsible for a great many animals being harmed and killed. I agree. However, this is not a knock-down argument that completely defuses the value of veganism. In fact, IF one is worried by the degree of harm to animals from cropping, vegans are doing better than most (we should bear in mind that veganism addresses all the ways we humans interact with other animals, so there is ample scope for vegan ethics to offer significant positive benefits for other species beyond the food system).

The reasoning for this conclusion – that a vegan diet is significantly less harmful to animals than a typical Western diet – is straight-forward.

First, a typical western consumer will eat between 50 and 100, possibly as many as 200 animals in a year, plus however many animals are killed as a by-product of production systems (eg chicks and hens killed in egg production, seafood by-catch, etc). On average, none of this happens for a vegan diet.

Second, as well as food derived from animals, most people also eat foods derived from plants – fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds, oils, bread, french fries, cakes, pasta, breakfast cereals, juices, jams and other spreads, beer, wine, sugar, etc. Plus, the animals they eat also eat plants. This means that while a vegan-friendly diet has a cropland footprint, so too does that of the typical consumer.

For a vegan-friendly diet to be more harmful than a typical Western diet, it must have a greater cropland footprint. Most research suggests it does not. The crops grown to feed a typical consumer include that used directly for their food and that used to feed the animals they eat. On average, it seems a typical Western diet requires about 0.20-0.25 hectares per year (a more meat heavy than average diet may use even more), while a plant-based diet requires about 0.12-0.15 hectares. This means that a vegan-friendly diet requires approximately 30% less cropland.

Now we can take a look at the arguments put forward in these two new videos. I suggest that overall, the videos are inaccurate and misrepresent the research presented as evidence. They fail to demonstrate that either more cropland is required for a global plant-based diet or that a vegan diet is more harmful on average.

PART 1 (https://youtu.be/ChU9KECnEL8?si=JZEdnuQ5iagkC5DF)

  1. At 0:15. The claim being made is that the majority of crops are grown for human food and not to feed animals. This is true. BUT, a significant proportion is grown for feed – up to 20% – while some other proportion ends up as animal feed. Overall, as much as 40% of global arable land is used to feed livestock (Mottet et al 2018). This is an important point.
  2. At 1:38. Here the speaker argues that in a vegan world, there would be more crops grown than is the case now. Assuming he means by this a world with zero animal agriculture and all food derived from plants, this is likely to be untrue. What research there is suggests that less arable land would be required (as mentioned above, up to 30% less – see Peters et al (2016) “Carrying capacity of U.S. agricultural land: Ten diet scenarios” – Figure 2).
  3. At 3:30. Both speakers claim Our World in Data is a flawed source and somehow driven by evil interests. However, Our World In Data is generally regarded as a reputable source so we should feel confident their data is reasonably fair and accurate.
  4. At 5:00. The speaker claims that the OWID graph showing that 77-80% of agricultural land is used for animal farming is misleading. No, it isn’t – this is correct. So it absolutely is true that IF we eliminated animal farming, we would free up for other uses as much as 70% of land currently used for agriculture. Note that the FAO observed in Mottet et al (2018) that some proportion of existing grazing land could be converted to crops (as much as 14% of global agricultural land).
  5. At 8:00. Pretending that anyone says that rocky cliffs can be used for crops is mischievous. What people are saying, the FAO included, is that some land currently used for grazing could be used for cropping, and that’s true. Just because there is land that can’t be used to grow crops doesn’t mean we have to graze animals on it.
  6. At 9:20. The claim that ruminant grazing for meat is a benefit is somewhat irrelevant to the main argument. While “regenerative grazing” might be a good strategy for restoring degraded grasslands, this could be achieved in other ways. The example given of bison in Romania is a case in point.
  7. At 14:00. The chart from the paper “Crop harvests for direct food use insufficient to meet the UN’s food security goal” makes my point clearly, however Garland and his guest seem to misunderstand what they are looking at. As they themselves observe, the land area for feed is half that of the land area for food. In other words, as much as one-third of all arable land dedicated to food and feed is used for feed. This goes to the point I made earlier about respective cropland footprints.
  8. At 15:30. Calories/protein are useful measures for working out the area of land needed to supply food. In particular, we can observe that a hectare of cropland can deliver substantial amounts of human edible protein. This is useful if we want to work out how much land is needed to replace animals with crops.
  9. At 18:30. The FAO graph where we see that soy meal is just 5% of livestock feed intake is being used carelessly. The proportion of feed intake would be significantly greater – and more salient – if we were evaluating only arable land use for feed (which is the metric in which we are interested).
  10. At 19:15 to 21:00. What’s being avoided here is that a significant proportion of soy is used to feed livestock, with about 93% of the soy harvest supplying the feed market. While oil is a co-product of crushing soy, it is likely not the main driver of soy production as a proportion of global oilcrop.
  11. At 21:20. Here the speaker claims that soy oil consistently fetches a higher price than meal, so for comparable units of production, the oil is the better value proposition. However, if we go by commodity prices as suggested in the video, soy meal is the greater earner per hectare of harvest (80% by weight is meal and just 20% by weight is oil).

    That means that for 100kg of soy, just 20kg will be oil and 80kg will be the meal. I’m not sure what current prices are, but let’s say they are somewhere around $0.45USD per kg for meal and $1.10USD per kg for oil. So, for my 100kg of soy crush, I would get back $36 for the meal and $22 for the oil.

    I checked with an ag consultant about this a while back:

    “My understanding is that the money is largely in the meal, but it is worth crushing to remove the oil. The meal is a protein source for feedlots; cows, pigs and chickens. The oil finds its way into many uses (food chain, industrial etc) but it is essentially a byproduct. That is what makes it hard for canola farmers because although canola oil is a superior and preferred oil in food manufacture it’s base price is determined by the soy oil price and soy oil production fluctuates with the need for soy meal. Canola is the reverse of soy in that oil is the valuable component, and a greater % (around 40 c.f. 20% for soybeans) and the meal is essentially a byproduct.”

    It is most likely that the feed market drives soy’s presence in the oilseed market.
  12. At 22:15. Absolute conspiracy theory nuttery. A truly vegan world would NOT be a benefit to the soy industry which depends on the inexorable growth of CAFO production for its own expansion. For example, the protein from all the meat and dairy produced in the US right now could be replaced by current levels of domestic soy consumption; instead it’s largely wasted being fed to CAFO raised animals (which is why the FAO find that we feed such animals about 2-3 times more human edible protein as we get back). A vegan world would not generate more soy.

PART 2 (https://youtu.be/KUNGGEYsVoU?si=fANjPP06tmzYwmwk)

  1. At 1:20 The pie charts from the paper “Nutritional and greenhouse gas impacts of removing animals from US agriculture” is NOT saying that a vegan food system requires three times more land for grains etc in total. It’s saying that for human FOOD, those are the relative proportions of sources. The graph does not include crops currently grown for industrial use, export use or animal feed, so it says nothing at all about the total arable land area needed in the current BAU. In fact, it quite clearly says that grains and soy that are currently used for feed are redirected to food: “human-edible feeds that were previously used by livestock are routed for human consumption”.
  2. At 4:42. The speaker refers to the paper “Plant-based diets add to the wastewater phosphorus burden” and suggests that a vegan diet would lead to an increased production of fertiliser and hence there must be an increase in cropland. This is a complete misrepresentation of the paper which notes that:

    “Livestock density is a major driver of this P inefficiency and pollution due to the extra land and fertiliser P required to produce animal feed and the difficulties of recycling livestock excreta evenly back to croplands (Leip et al 2015, Withers et al 2020). Increasing global demand for animal food products has increased the demand for mined P by 28% since 1961, and 90% of the environmental P footprint for an individual UK resident is due to animal product consumption (Metson et al 2012). As such, transitioning towards a plant-based diet seems beneficial for P sustainability by reducing global P fertilizer demand and lowering eutrophication rates by reducing individual P footprints (Macdonald et al 2012, Metson et al 2012, Thaler et al 2015).”

    and

    “Although reducing animal products in diets is an effective way for UK consumers to reduce their P, and other environmental footprints (e.g. Leach et al 2016, González-García et al 2018, Vanham et al 2018), these footprints are not the only metric that must be taken into account when planning for a more sustainable food system.”
  1. At 5:30. The graph from the paper, “Essential Amino Acids: Master Regulators of Nutrition and Environmental Footprint” is also being used mischievously. In fact, the graph tells us that the land needed to produce any of the main food types is largest for beef and pork, while the smallest area is needed for most vegetable foods and especially for soybeans.
  2. At 12:50. Making up stories about governments/vegans forcing people to be vegan is a nonsense. While some fanatics might indeed advocate for this, at the end of the day any progress towards a “vegan” world would depend entirely on the willingness of the people to be moved in that direction. No government wanting to remain in power would risk losing the support of the vast majority by enforcing dietary limitations. This is just more nutty conspiracy theorising.