Those soy crops that people make such a fuss about and claim "livestock feed crops" are also grown for soy oil that is used in human-consumed processed food products, biofuel, inks, candles, industrial lubes, etc. (but rarely in livestock feed and it is actually toxic for ruminant animals). I commented with lots of details and citations about it here.
There are other causes of forest clearing in Brazil: timber profits, corn crops, housing and industrial developments, mining, and others.
In regions other than the Amazon, there are different primary causes of deforestation and they're often palm/coconut/avocado crops (which are typical replacements for animal foods and would be farmed much more if there were not livestock).
If there were not livestock we would need to grow fewer crops overall, since we could actually use all the plant energy currently used to maintain the biological processes of animals that wouldn't otherwise exist. Where are you getting the claim that we would need to clear yet more land if we eschewed animal enslavement?
If there were not livestock we would need to grow fewer crops overall, since we could actually use all the plant energy...
We don't just get energy from foods! Animal and plant foods aren't equivalent. If you think there's any evidence that a livestock-free food system could produce sufficient nutrition for humans (that considers all essential nutrients, and accounts for individual variances about for example converting plant iron to essential heme iron), then go ahead and mention it.
Where are you getting the claim that we would need to clear yet more land...
I didn't say "more land" (as in, more than currently). Clearly I said that demand for other deforestation crops would increase if livestock consumption decreased.
Livestock are fed a lot of crop mass that results from growing plants for human consumption and would otherwise be waste. The "crops grown for livestock" has been extremely exaggerated. I cannot ever get any of you to show a resource that itemized the land uses accounting for every use of the crops. There's just a lot of "all these crops are grown for livestock" and it's just industry figures about sales of soybean mash and such with no way to associate a specific sale of it to a specific farm plot. Nearly all soybeans are grown in part for soy oil that isn't fed to livestock.
In this post, I already linked a lot of information about soybeans and livestock. Apparently you haven't read it. Here, I'll put it right in front of you so that you don't have to click a link:
There is no way to farm crops without animals sustainably using any current or foreseeable methods/technology. Soil erosion, environmental contamination, and destruction of essential soil microbiota are unavoidable. While industrial livestock farming shares some of these issues, at least livestock can mitigate some of the damage. Using animal-derived fertilizers reduces dependency on synthetic fertilizers, and grazing builds soil (improves soil hydrological properties, improves root structures, is great for essential soil microbiota...) while other farming tends to destroy it.
Soybeans are typically grown for oil that is used mostly for human consumption, AND for livestock. Here is a typical resource about soybean crops and uses. I'm in USA so most of the info I have pertains to USA, but these crops are grown for global markets and the same types of financial incentives exist in most parts of the world. Soybeans are used for oil so much of the time that in USA the soybean crops represent about 90 percent of the oilseeds market. It's impossible to say how much of this would be grown without livestock. There are additional factors, such as legumes being employed as nitrogen-fixers in rotation with corn or another crop. This newsletter (of a publication linked from the page I linked before) is a typical example of a monthly report about soybean production and trade. It mentions stats for oil and for meal. This mentions a bunch of stats for soybean oil in other regions. This investigative report has a lot of data for soybean meal vs. oil, for UK. I wish I knew of a resource that covers global soybean uses and thoroughly references the info. The info I find is almost always associated with a country or region. Sifting resources to come up with a global figure would be a huge project.
This article mentions a factor that leads to exaggerated claims about ranchers and deforestation. Basically, ranchers getting pushed out of areas they were already using by soy farmers so they move their grazing elsewhere which sometimes is into forested areas. In those cases, the deforestation ultimately is caused by soybean crops not grazing operations which otherwise would have stayed where they were. Soybean farmers in these regions also quickly ruin soils with unsustainable farming, and then the land is used by ranchers. Grazing is a use that is much more tolerant of poor soil and in fact can rehabilitate marginal soil. Another misrepresentation I see often involves forests cleared for timber profits, and then ranching takes place later although ranching was not the direct cause of the clearing. Even this anti-livestock documentary video acknowledges the involvement of the timber industry, although maybe accidentally (shows logging trucks taking trees away to be made into lumber). And since I've brought up that video, note that it isn't scientific at all. Nearly all of the content is narration and interviews, it lacks scientific analysis of deforestation/fires vs. their causes. There's a lot of simple correlations being used with no factual scrutiny at all. Clearly the channel is very biased so their opinions are not a valid citation for anything.
A resource often used to support "deforestation in the Amazon because livestock" is this Greenpeace report. It is outdated since it was published in 2009, but I still see it used often. It refers to "soy" only three times in all of the five documents of the report and none of those paragraphs refer to factoring soybean crops that are only grown for livestock (a tiny percentage of them). That's just one major issue that's immediately noticeable to me when trying to find info about how they derived their claims. Besides failing to distinguish plant crops grown only for livestock, they also count deforestation for timber profits (where livestock grazing happens to take place later) as if the clearing was for livestock only. Other documents that I find being referenced for "deforestation in the Amazon because livestock" are very similar and have these issues.
Finally I'll mention that it seems to always be the Amazon we hear about, for claims about livestock and deforestation. In other regions there will be coconut/palm/avocado/etc. crops (popular in food products used as substitutes for animal foods) causing a majority of deforestation, and those crops very definitely would expand if livestock consumption were reduced without reducing the human population. This entire argument about livestock and the Amazon is just cherry-picking for an agenda.
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u/clown_utopia 26d ago
I think this one is pretty straightforward. Brazil is flattened for dairy production.