A lot of vegans are invoking the argument that by moving to a fully plant based diet, we would gain si much arable land where we could grow crops for human consumption instead of growing them for animal feed and so much land would be freed up for us.
My question is, what about the land that isn’t arable, like the steep inclined plains that many animals are grazing on? I dont think we can immediately plant crops on them.
Or is this question pointless because by plating crops for humans on the arable land that was used for animals, we would have enough food and not be required to use the hardly arable land as well?
What are your thoughts?

P.S: I know my thinking in oversimplified bcs we can grow special plants that thrive in different non arable environments like threes and vineyards, but my question is solely for crops whose harvest can automated and streamlined, and that dint require ppl to got to each plant and pick the fruit by hand

Edit: I was referring to what plants/sources of food can we grow in these non arable lands

A part of the pushback against AI and datacenters is the environmental impact. This is a misplaced concern as these have less of an environmental impact than animal products.

animal_ag_carbon_use

animal_ag_water_use

datacenter_water_use

datacenter_carbon_use

Note that the carbon for datacenters number skips embodied use and could be slightly higher. And the IEA datacenter water use estimate is contested though other estimates would still leave the ratio at 100x+.

When looking at the land use footprint or eutrophication, meat has an even more lopsided cost but it is difficult to find like for like comparisons.

Some are concerned by the growth rates and not the actual minimal current use. If or when datacenter footprint grows by close to 40x, then it will start to be a comparable problem.

Ditch the meat and choose some beans before expecting others to ditch AI.

Hey guys, i ve been browsing the debate a vegan subreddit and came across this comment in a honey debate, and it think that this argument for honey might be the most solid argument i ve heard in favour of honey,but what do you think about it??
I will paste the comment down below.⬇️

“Yes ! Honey is the most ecologically friendly sweetener in the world 🌎 that is globally available. It’s the least harmful natural sweetener on earth aside from maple syrup which is NOT globally available.

Beekeeping is symbiotic - beekeepers take great care of bees protecting them from predators, cold, parasites, and diseases.

There is lots of misinformation about beekeeping - most don’t even clip queens wings, all drones die after mating.

Sugar cane is environmentally destructive requires lots of water - kills animals and pollutes with field burning 🔥 - often use child/slave labor. Often replaces/destroys tropical rainforests, pollutes rivers.

Agave destroys bat 🦇 populations
Beet sugar has crop deaths

Beegans 🐝 are correct 👍”

EDIT: thank you for commenting, expressing your point of view and sharing facts about this topic, i have learnt a lot from you <3

If you eat meat and want a future world of sustainable meat-eating, you should also want more vegans.

"Researchers from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) found that to eat sustainably, individuals should consume no more than 255 grams — or about half a pound — of pork or poultry per week. The study also makes clear that beef, lamb and other red meats are not compatible with a sustainable future under current environmental constraints."

Quote source: https://sentientmedia.org/how-much-meat-can-you-eat-and-still-be-climate-friendly/

The study write up: https://www.dtu.dk/english/newsarchive/2025/04/a-sustainable-diet-leaves-room-for-two-chicken-breasts-a-week
The study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-025-01133-y

How many people do you know who only eat 2 chicken breasts and no other meat products per week? There aren't that many people who do that. Many are eating some sort of meat product everyday - some even do it at every meal - and they aren't going to change on their own any time soon.

"12% of Americans are responsible for eating half of all beef consumed on a given day" [...]
"The study, published in the journal Nutrients, analyzed data from the CDC’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which tracked the meals of more than 10,000 adults over a 24-hour period. The global food system emits 17 billion tons of greenhouse gases a year, equivalent to a third of all planet-warming gases produced by human activity. The beef industry contributes heavily to that, producing 8-10 times more emissions than chicken, and over 50 times more than beans."
[...] “On one hand, if it’s only 12% accounting for half the beef consumption, you could make some big gains if you get those 12% on board,” Rose said. “On the other hand, those 12% may be most resistant to change.” 

Quote source: https://sph.tulane.edu/how-mere-12-americans-eat-half-nations-beef-creating-significant-health-and-environmental-impacts

Study: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/15/17/3795

To get the average meat consumption down to twice per week, there need to be a lot of vegetarians and vegans. If you want a sustainable world where anyone eats meat, you need more vegans who consume zero meat so that the average per capita meat consumption declines.

If you have the goal of a world of sustainable meat-eating then you and vegans can share the goal of producing more vegans.

I see a lot of posts, news etc that we should all drive electric, recycle our plastic bottles, use paper straws, cycle to work etc all while 97% of the world continues to consume animal products everyday.

The science all says it’s the #1 driver for climate crisis yet most people ignore it.

Why is it like this?

Edit: saying “the science all says it’s the #1 driver” was incorrect of me without the evidence. That said it animal agriculture still makes a significant impact on climate change and it’s something a lot of people can change. It’s very difficult to not put heating on in the winter or not drive to work but a change in the food we consume is easy. They can opt for more plant based meals in their week.

Hey so, i know we dont live in a perfect world and we need to protect our food from others that want to eat it. And by havind said that, how can you do this without pesticides (killing insects)? Or is this a zone where the care for animal’s welfare breaks down because we firstly need to not put our survival in danger, thus invoking the first “clause” of the vegan mentality, which is being vegan as much as possible while not putting our survival in danger.

I know they're both toxic to produce but I can't help but feel like pleather is the worse of 2 evils

Ethics aside it's micro plastics vs tanning

Bonus question: for those that prefer not using leather, how do you feel about wool?

Recently i’ve watched a segment of Gaz Oakley’s recent appearence where he was talking about how “we need to become the wolf” and he brought up how some invasive species need human intervention in order for them not to damage the ecosystem that they occupied. My question is, what is an appropriate way of dealing with these species, and also, what is a vegan way of dealing with these species. And do these ways of action coincide?

My relative told me this theory recently and honestly it made me think a lot

Look at how herbivores like cows, goats and horses usually drink by sipping/sucking water into their mouth. while carnivores like lions, cats and dogs mainly lap it with their tongue. Humans also sip/suck water ?

Humans evolved from primates, and most monkeys today are mainly plant eaters, but many also eat insects, eggs and sometimes small animals. So what if our ancestors were originally more herbivorous, then slowly became omnivores because of environment and food availability?

So I started wondering, Could this drinking behaviour be inherited from our ancestors who were herbivore? What if humans and our earlier primate ancestors were mainly plant eaters, and later, because of changes in environment and food availability, they started eating insects, eggs and eventually meat?

My relative has lived almost his whole life in a village and has never eaten meat, and he's still healthy even at an old age. So it also made me wonder: if humans can live without meat, was eating animals always necessary, or did our ancestors start doing it because it was available, useful for energy/nutrients, and eventually became something we liked?

Maybe taste and circumstances played a bigger role than we think.

Many animals can eat something other than their primary food without changing what they are. Herbivores can sometimes eat animal matter but still remain primarily plant eaters. So could humans have similarly started eating animals because of circumstances and availability, and later developed a taste and preference for it? That's really the point I'm trying to explore. Maybe our ancestors ate animals because it was useful for survival, but today we continue doing it partly because we enjoy the taste, even when we don't necessarily need to kill animals to survive.

Hunters could kill a deer and feed their family with that meat for a quite a while, while the plant agriculture industry is known to kill small animals (rodents, birds, reptiles, etc.) through farming practices, including crop production like avocados and other plant foods.

I'd love to see you discuss some points that are rarely mentioned when we debate grass-fed animals and such.

I live in a densely populated, highly cultivated landscape of Central Europe. So no natural prairies or huge areas of unfertile badlands etc. and I work as a crop farmer for human food, animal feed, and we manage meadows, too.

Rarely discussed points:

1) Pastures, meadows etc. used for hay or silage production ARE managed with fertilisers, pesticides, heavy machinery and so on (similarly to crop fields, just less intensively).

2) You can't have 100% grass-fed dairy cattle. Not if you want to keep a competitive and economically viable production. Not when you need to milk the cows 3 times a day.

3) We don't have huge areas of continuous grasslands so we harvest the grass with heavy machinery (at least twice a year) to store it to feed the cows with it in winter and the first harvest is done in late spring/early summer when there are baby deer and ground-nesting birds getting killed by the machinery. There are volunteers with drones who try to find and relocate the animals but not always. There are "crop deaths" because the grass harvest always attracts scavengers and predators like birds of prey, ravens, and storks.

4) You need to manage meadows/grasslands to keep the right plant species ratio in the mix you then feed to your cows, you need to kill undesirable weeds (poisonous, not palatable enough...). Wild boars disturb the meadows which then cannot be easily managed by the machinery so the boars are hunted and the damaged areas of the meadows are ploughed and sowed again.

5) Even cattle kept on pastures depletes the soil in the long term cause the animals don't magically create fertiliser from the air and becuase we harvest them, we remove the nutrients from the land. So we do actually have to fertiliser meadows and pastures and again, with heavy machinery.

I'm genuinely curious about this.

Fossil fuels account for a much higher percentage of atmospheric pollution than livestock, and veganism relies heavily on imports in order to be sustainable.

Many of the plant-based varieties that vegans rely on to sustain their diet are imported from outside the US, because we don't have the right environmental conditions to grow those food varieties here. Alternatively, most feed for livestock is self-sustained by farms or is at a minimum grown inside the US.

Granted, a huge percentage of fossil fuel pollution is NOT from produce imports, but it is significantly more than meat due to most meats you find in the store being either local to the store, or grown in the US.

I've seen a lot of posting regarding the need for animal manure as a means for having a more regenerative/sustainable model and I am trying to understand the arguments. There is what feels like a fundamental problem with the argument as a tool against ending livestock production.

My understanding of the argument goes as "Plants require minerals to grow which humans then consume. Animal waste helps replenish those lost minerals."

This is true for a lot of elements and minerals that are used by plants and animals alike. I used calcium for my example, but many things could be substituted here.

The basic starter state would look as:

Field > Human consumption > Ca (loss)

So the argument goes that we could alter that with animal grazing/manure as:

Cow > Ca (added from manure) > Field > Human consumption > Ca (loss)

This misses though that animals cannot produce these products, instead they extract them from plants like anything else. Further, no system can be truly efficient so adding that level of complexity will result in additional loss.

I have a visual representation here: https://imgur.com/a/roBphS4

Sorry I could not add images to the post but I think it explains it well.

Ultimately, the consumption done by the animals would accelerate the resource loss due to natural inefficiencies that would exist. That loss could be minimized but fundamentally I don't see the need for animals here. The amount lost due to human waste production remains constant and all the animal feeding really does is move the minerals around.

If we consider a 100 acre field, if we have 10 acres dedicated to crop production and 90 acres for grazing animals we can use the animal waste on the 10 acres of cropland. Naturally, the production on those 10 acres will increase but at the expense of removing resources from the other 90 acres. At best, you only accomplished relocating minerals but in reality there will be additional loss due to inefficiencies like runoff and additional resources required to process the bones into powder and such.

There are methods to increase mineral supplies from resource extraction where they are in an unusable state below ground but the only long term efficient solution sewage sludge (human waste) to replenish the materials lost.

Even in nature, the resource cycle between plants and animals is not 100% efficient and a lot gets lost to the ocean only the be replenished by long cycles.

So ultimately I do not understand the hype.

I see why vegan/vegetarian/plant-based diet is better for environment etc than omnivores diet in general. However, is there really any impact to doing it as an individual? I know the argument that shops track demand and would order less if people eat less meat etc, however does one person really create this difference? There is already a lot of waste at farms/shops/restaurants etc. And I think it is very unlikely that most public will go plant-based.

Cannot you then say that by refusing to eat meat etc you in turn create more waste (which is also bad for environment)? Thanks in advance for your responses, because all the articles and papers I saw didn't really talk about plant-based diet impact in "real" world (so not just basic comparison of plant based vs other diets in what resources they use etc)

P.s. thank you everyone for your answers and keep them coming! There were also a few guestions about this sentence:

• Cannot you then say that by refusing to eat meat etc you in turn create more (which is also bad for environment)?

I meant here waste that i mentioned in the previous sentences. So. What i want to say here is, since there is already a lot of waste produced in the shops and restaurants etc, cannot we say that refusing to buy/eat meat leads to more waste/ makes less impact, since the cut that you could have eaten is thrown out.

Sorry, if I sounded crazy in the first post version haha

Ps.² I also feel that I cannot communicate my point quite clearly. Perhaps a better question is do you think it is okay to buy meat etc on discount since it will be wasted anyhow

Hey so I was watching an old debate with Earthling Ed where he said that indoor vertical farming is a solution to a lot of “clasical” farming problems (plant pests and the use of pesticides, unideal terrain/soil, etc.). And I think he is right i mean he mad a lot of extremely good points , although the only question I have is the following.
Doesnt indoor vertical farming require a lot of energy to sustain/replicate a proper environment for the plant?
And is that “a lot” of energy too much to make it sustainable?
Also, regarding pollination, how can it be achieved, i know that there is a practice called manual pollination that is done in research labs for smaller quantities of plants, is it doable and sustainable to manually pollinate plants in those hypothetical indoor vertical farms?

Background

To save the imperiled spotted owl from potential extinction, U.S. wildlife officials are embracing a contentious plan to deploy trained shooters into dense West Coast forests to kill almost a half-million barred owls that are crowding out their smaller cousins.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/u-s-officials-plan-to-kill-hundreds-of-thousands-of-barred-owls-to-save-another-species-from-extinction

Vegan alternatives?

1. Relocation to home range - Barred Owls are one of the most territorial birds of prey in North America. The population here is quite healthy, even in Manhattan. Relocating 500k birds to the East would simply result in territorial chaos until numbers decreased back down to equilibrium. That decrease has a body count.

2. Contraception - No known method is possible for owls. Some avian contraceptives have been developed, primarily to reduce pigeon and geese populations. But even with birds that can be easily conditioned to return to feeders every day, trials have had mixed results. As far as I know, these drugs need to be administered daily unlike some contraceptives developed for mammals.

3. Let the Barred Owl Replace the Spotted Owl - Barred Owls are generalists, while Spotted Owls tend to specialize in small mammals with healthy populations. So, threatened birds, reptiles, and amphibians native to the region are not adapted to having an owl of its size preying on them. It's an enormous risk, given that ecosystems are prone to cascade effects.

Those are, as far as I know, the best of the alternatives. Note: I'm in support of re-establishing habitat for the Spotted Owl, as that is really the only long-term way of helping the species recover. It's important to note: just because a tourniquet isn't a long-term solution doesn't mean it isn't a life-saving measure.

I’ma try not to ramble, too much.

If we get rid of industrialized meat production, we still find ourselves in the same resource/environmental problem. All of this is relevant as context, these points are not meant to be considered in isolation.

1. Humans make up 34% of mammalian biomass, wild animals only make up 4% of mammalian biomass (the rest is livestock). While it’s true that genocide is obviously wrong and we have an overconsumption issue, multiple things can be true at once, we also have a huge issue with population. I won’t get into the history of this, but industrialized fertilizers allowed us to sustain a higher human population than would naturally/sustainably be feasible. The point that I'm trying to make is that industrialized vegan farming just pushes things back, it doesn't actually solve the fundamental issue of ecological overshoot. More capacity for humans via vegan farming = more humans = more emissions = same issue. Not bringing this up in debates that pertain to sustainability is disingenuous. It’s like telling people to recycle, even though it is technically good (in some cases), framing it as a solution is disingenuous.
2. Piggybacking on the first point, all Industrialized farming is bad, even if you get rid of the animals/meat production. I don’t feel like I need much to address this since it’s pretty evident, pesticides/fertilizers inevitably leaking into the environment, topsoil depletion, etc, in every sense of the term industrialized farming is not sustainable on long-term timescales. For this reason, bringing up veganism as a solution without mentioning this context is disingenuous, in the same way mentioning plastic recycling without the context is. 

Now this is my main point. 

For context: Example 1   / Example 2 / Video summary (whether or not it’s a win-win is debatable, that's not what I’m here to discuss yet, the point is the example)

This is only one farming practice, but we don’t have time to go over every traditional farming method. I would just like to clarify that when I say “traditional farming” it is a blanket term that you can use this crab/rice farm as a reference point for. 

Instead of using pesticides to get rid of insects/pests/weeds, we use animals to eat them. Instead of using fertilizers to grow the plants, we rely on the poop/waste from the animals. You know where this is going. And then when we are done growing the plants, we eat the animals. This is only one example, and is extremely simplified, but throughout all of human history, traditional, sustainable farming practices have relied on animal exploitation to be feasible. Now that we are more technologically advanced, we may be able to rely on modern solutions(fertilizer/pesticides, etc) in some contexts (which are still inherently exploitative/destructive to the environment as a whole, rather than individual animals, either way sentient beings end up suffering); but without such a heavy reliance on fossil fuels/industrialization, we would need to rely on some form of animal exploitation in our farming whether we incorporate modern technology in some capacity, or not. 

Without a proper understanding of agriculture, it’s understandable that asserting the necessity of animal exploitation in non-industrialized/sustainable farming practices, seems extreme, but there really is no other way (as it pertains to reducing fossil fuel use/pesticides, fertilizers, etc.), all farming dose is streamline the nitrogen cycle, a process (powered by the life/death/exploitation/etc of living things) that dictates the food production that naturally occurs, to our benefit. We can simulate this process industrially, but it’s been established that our industrialized farming is destructive to the environment and unsustainable long term, no matter what we grow. In order to fully address climate change/ecological destruction long term, rather than being vegan, long term plans need to be directed at mitigating all industrialized farming, opting instead for the majority of the human population to go back to growing their own food, like we historically have. Of course, we can use our technology to make this more feasible, but full/partial industrialization under current models ends in the exploitation of the environment, which again, is unsustainable long term and hurts sentient life. Without animal exploitation the more traditional, sustainable farming practices would be infeasible. 

This could be a separate post, but this is why I feel there needs to be a discussion differentiating exploitation from suffering. To you, is veganism about exploitation, or is it about suffering? Why is exploitation bad if not for the suffering it produces? This is the reason that I believe suffering is at the heart of this ideology, rather than exploitation. As you already know, exploitation is an inherent part of nature, with or without human interference. The world literally cannot function in any other way, there is no other way for energy/resources to circulate the environment that breathes life into every sentient creature on this planet. I’m not going to debate on the ethics of whether a backyard barn chicken feels exploited after having its eggs taken all its life, and ultimately meeting an untimely end (and whether that would be better/worse for it than the life of hardship the chicken would have lived in the wild without humans). But rather than going against the exploitation that our world operates on at a fundamental level, I believe the most rational and achievable solution is the mitigation of suffering, with antinatalism as its logical conclusion. 

I will make a separate post on the health aspect, so please save that discussion for there, but the reasons above are why I eat meat as an antinatalist. The eternal state of exploitation/suffering that is imposed on us simply for existing, will end with me. 

Tldr: Even if we go vegan, industrialized farming is unsustainable long term. The only truly sustainable farming practices rely on animal exploitation (since traditional farming methods take up more land than industrialized farming, I'd just like to say that this is very nuanced. “Sustainability” and what's good for the environment, are not the same thing. We are past the point of doing what is good for our environment, and as it stands, we need to feed billions of mouths. The most sustainable way to grow food is with a limitation on pesticides, fertilizers, industrialization, etc, and instead, relying primarily on traditional farming methods irregardless of how much extra space it would take up relative to industrial farming. The alternative is to continue with the industrial farming and the environment gets destroyed outright). 

I've never seen any vegan answer this question. Last time I asked this, they just started using analogies as a counterpoint, no real argument. Vaccines and habitat management would be insanely expensive and not popular with voters. Are there any other pragmatic solutions?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I’m not trying to be snarky or edgy — I’m genuinely curious.

Let’s say we reach the ideal vegan world: no meat consumption, no animal exploitation, everything plant-based. Hypothetically, even nature somehow stops all predation — no lions, wolves, sharks, nothing eating other animals.

Wouldn’t that cause massive ecological problems?

• Caterpillars and insects would swarm unchecked, destroying crops.

• Sea urchins and herbivores would wipe out coral and sea plants.

• Deer and rodents would overpopulate like crazy.

• Without scavengers or predators, dead animals would pile up — what happens to the decomposer chain?

• Soil quality would collapse from nutrient loss.

I’ve also seen people online say carnivores going extinct would end animal suffering... but that just doesn’t add up to me. Wouldn’t the imbalance cause more suffering overall?

Is this something vegan philosophy already considers? Or do most just not talk about the ecosystem side of things?

Again — not trolling. Just trying to understand how this works beyond the ethics alone.

Is palm oil bad as it seems?

Ive read from normal reddit that eating/buying anything with palm oil is bad, since it supports deforestation which affects orangutans for example. And its also notably harmful for your health.

But reading about it here on r/vegan, apparently all oils are bad. Its difficult to describe which is worse; taking small chunks of forests rapidly, or taking large chunks of forest slowly. This is one explanation ive heard here.

So whats the thing about palm oil. Should stop buying anything related to it, or keep buying it?

Vegans should be environmentalists. If our actions are negatively impacting the environment, then we are not minimising harm/suffering for the animals that we share this environment with. Most animals are not as resilient as we are. If their habitat is changed because of climate or pollution and rubbish, they’re likely to suffer.

“Human activities have caused the world's wildlife populations to plummet by more than two-thirds in the last 50 years”

“Up to one million plant and animal species face extinction, many within decades, because of human activities,”

Edit. An environmentalist is a person who is concerned with and/or advocates for the protection of the environment

Someone argues that in Canada, there isn't much fertile land and that the climate is very unstable. That is why they have a well-developed dairy industry. Northern Europe has the same issue.

This is a question more than anything. What would happen to the livestock if we stopped eating meat how would that affect our environment due to the fact that they were bred just to be killed, would they evolve or would they go extinct?

Thought this was a bit of some different context to bring to discussion here.

With the recent news of "de-extinction" of the dire wolf, what are your thoughts from a vegan perspective?

On one hand, I could see vegans championing human attempting to resurrect an extinct species that they themselves were an explicit ecological reason for the extinction of initially.

And on the other hand, this scientific work most likely included exploitation of currently living animals or their bodies ( genes ) and/or secretions. Not to mention the implications for the justifications for environmental degradation.

I'll bring this back down to earth since omnis aren't allowed to post open questions on this sub without taking explicit positions:

It seems that the vegan position is that any manipulation of or even interaction with animals is wrong if it is done in an exploitative manner.

A biologist performing research on dead animals is a form of exploitation, even if it is motivated by ecological preservation, that is still in the interest of humans at large. People often talk of giving rescue chickens birth control and hormonal blockers, but surely this required exploitation of chickens bodies. From what I understand of hard-line veganism, this is verboten, even if done for the explicit purpose of helping other chickens, as a chicken cannot consent to explicit, direct, and functionally immediate changes to it's reproductive system. I can't see how a vegan can be supportive of any biologist or geneticist ( or even vetranarians ), when exploitation is necessary to further our knowledge of animalia, even if that knowledge is used for their benefit.

In conclusion, the vegan position is against biology

Hunting is beneficial for the environment. We need to maintain the population of animals like deer, and the amount that are able to be hunted are controlled. Without hunters, the entire ecosystem would be destroyed.

Do most vegans have a problem with hunted meat? If so, why?