A new report finds that the United States could produce food more efficiently if half the nation’s protein supply came from plant-based or alternative proteins rather than meat or dairy.
The analysis demonstrates how a shift to a plant-based diet offers ample benefits for the environment and the climate. In its latest report, the Good Food Institute, or GFI—a non-profit think tank that supports the growth of alternative proteins—calculates that if Americans replaced 50 percent of their animal protein consumption with plant-based options, then 47.3 million fewer acres of cropland would be needed to grow the same amount of protein.
That land, totaling an area roughly the size of South Dakota, represents tremendous opportunities for carbon sequestration and biodiversity, according to GFI. The organization argues that if those acres aren’t used to grow crops, they could instead be turned into carbon sinks or used to restore threatened ecosystems. This will deliver climate benefits over and above the reduction of animal agriculture’s more direct emission sources: manure and cow dung.
The US currently devotes a tremendous amount of land to agriculture: More than 60 percent of the land in the contiguous US is used for agriculture, and 21 percent of that is cropland. A majority of the country’s arable land – 78 percent – is used to grow crops that are mainly used to feed animals.
The shift to increased alternative protein production outlined in the GFI report will not require growing more plants. Instead, the U.S. could meet its current protein demand by growing fewer crops overall, and ensuring that more of the commodity crops we already produce — such as soy, grains, corn, barley, oats, and sorghum — are grown for human consumption. become
“I think a lot of people, when they hear about plant-based diets, they’re like, ‘That’s going to take so much soy,'” says Priera Panescu Scott, GFI’s lead plant-based scientist, whose background is in materials. and agricultural science. But Panescu Scott, who co-authored the report, points out that soy is mostly grown to feed livestock, not people. worldwide, a majority of soy is used for livestock feedwhile only 7 percent end up as tofu, tempeh, soy milk or other foods.
Stephen Wood, an associate research scientist and lecturer at the Yale School of the Environment who was not involved in the report, called the findings “straightforward and expected.”
“The fact that you go from feeding animals that then eat people to just feeding people will always be more efficient and therefore it will always require less land,” said Wood.
However, to calculate the carbon sinks and biodiversity opportunities associated with shifting cropland use in the US, the authors of the GFI report significantly limited the scope of their analysis. Rather than looking at all animal protein consumption in the US, the report includes cropland used to support the livestock raised and consumed in the US. Seafood is notably absent from the report, as is protein imported from abroad. Wood points out that these parameters do not reflect how agricultural inputs can exceed or move across borders. “It’s a bit artificial to draw a border around the United States,” said Wood, who is also a senior scientist for agriculture and food systems at The Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit.
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To illustrate this, Wood pointed out that if the US plants fewer acres of soybeans, but the demand for meat remains high, then another country could simply step in and replace the US as a soybean producer. That increase in production can contribute to environmental problems elsewhere, such as deforestation in Argentina’s Chaco region. To successfully shift land use globally, there will need to be a commensurate shift in demand for plant-based protein – which can be difficult to achieve.
The narrow focus of the report was deliberate, Panescu Scott said. “We really wanted to present the opportunities for land efficiency in the U.S.,” she said, adding, “in this case, we spent a lot of time really looking at historical and current data sets of maps, to understand where the real opportunities are. would lie.”
As a result, the report identifies the greatest opportunities for land use transformation in the Midwest and the South. This is partly because the Midwest is an agricultural hub with a lot of croplandand also because of the forests that exist in the South, which are excellent carbon sinks, but also experienced significant deforestation due to industry. By letting that land “go back to that native forest land as much as possible, it’s going to help tremendously with both carbon sequestration and biodiversity opportunities,” Panescu Scott said.
Of course, a major shift in the country’s agricultural production could also have adverse economic impacts on farmers who made a living from growing, for example, soy. Panescu Scott mentioned that public and private funding is needed to study those potential changes and explore new market opportunities or alternative income streams for farmers. One solution contained in the report is to compensate landowners for habitat restoration undertaken on their property. Wood added that the entire agricultural value chain must be considered to understand the extent of any potential adverse economic impacts.
Even without changing the demand for meat or the quantity of soybeans, Wood noted, farmers can already adopt practices to better care for local ecosystems. On the report’s note on restoring critical habitats, Wood said: “You can do that in cropland too. There’s a big push toward what they call edge-of-field practices” — for example, feeding wetlands on the outskirts of cropland as a way to manage water use and runoff. “There are in-between systems.”
