6 Reasons to Go Vegan

Take this 6 facts:

• Worldwide over 852 million people go hungry.
• 79% of annual world cereal + soy harvest is consumed by the 20billion "farm- animals".
• To produce 1 kg of meat, you need 7-16 kg corn or soy beans+ 15.000 litres of water.
• On the surface, which is needed to harvest 1 kg of meat, could generate, in the same period, 200 kg of tomatoes or 160 kg of potatoes.
• 50% of water pollution in Europe are caused by factory farms.
• The contribution of livestock to the greenhouse effect is the same as that of the entire global, auto, air and waterway together.

GO VEGAN ! ♥

Redirecting even a portion of the grain used to fatten cattle could feed every hungry mouth on the planet.
- Forks Over Knives

Original Here!

Eating Meat = Poisoning the Earth

Industrial-scale agriculture now dominates the western livestock and poultry industries, and a single farm can now generate as much waste as a city. A cow excretes around 40kg of manure for every kilogram of edible beef it puts on and when you have many thousands crowded into a small area the effect can be dramatic. Their manure and urine is funnelled into massive waste lagoons sometimes holding as many as 40m gallons. These cesspools often break, leak or overflow, polluting underground water supplies and rivers with nitrogen, phosphorus and nitrates.

Tens of thousands of miles of rivers in the US, Europe and Asia are polluted each year. A single spill of millions of gallons of waste from a North Carolina pig factory lagoon in 1995 killed about 10 million fish and forced the closure of 364,000 acres of coastal wetlands to shellfishing.

The sheer quantity of animals now being raised for humans to eat now threatens the earth's biodiversity. More than one third of the world's 825 "ecoregions" identified by conservation group WWF are said to be threatened by livestock and giant US group Conservation International reckons that 23 out of 40-odd global "biodiversity hotspots" – the places considered most valuable for life – are now seriously affected by livestock production.

Eating Meat = Wasting Water

Eat a steak or a chicken and you are effectively consuming the water that the animal has needed to live and grow. Vegetarian author John Robbins calculates it takes 60, 108, 168, and 229 pounds of water to produce one pound of potatoes, wheat, maize and rice respectively. But a pound of beef needs around 9,000 liters – or more than 20,000lbs of water. Equally, it takes nearly 1,000 liters of water to produce one liter of milk. A broiler chicken, by contrast, is far more efficient, producing the same amount of meat as a cow on just 1,500 liters.

Pigs are some of the thirstiest animals. An average-sized north American pig farm with 80,000 pigs needs nearly 75m gallons of fresh water a year. A large one, which might have one million or more pigs, may need as much as a city.

Farming, which uses 70% of water available to humans, is already in direct competition for water with cities. But as demand for meat increases, so there will be less available for both crops and drinking. Rich but water-stressed countries such as Saudi Arabia, Libya, the Gulf states and South Africa say it makes sense to grow food in poorer countries to conserve their water resources, and are now buying or leasing millions of hectares of Ethiopia and elsewhere to provide their food. Every cow fattened in Gambella state in southern Ethiopia and exported to Abu Dhabi or Britain is taking the pressure off water supplies back home but increasing it elsewhere.

Eating Meat = Eating up Land

A human population expected to grow by 3 billion, a shift in developing countries to eating more meat, and global consumption on track to double in 40 years point to the mother of all food crises down the road. How much food we grow is not just limited by the amount of available land but meat-eaters need far more space than vegetarians. A Bangladeshi family living off rice, beans, vegetables and fruit may live on an acre of land or less, while the average American, who consumes around 270 pounds of meat a year, needs 20 times that.

Nearly 30% of the available ice-free surface area of the planet is now used by livestock, or for growing food for those animals. One billion people go hungry every day, but livestock now consumes the majority of the world's crops. A Cornell University study in 1997 found that around 13m hectares of land in the US were used to grow vegetables, rice, fruit, potatoes and beans, but 302m were used for livestock. The problem is that farm animals are inefficient converters of food to flesh. Broiler chickens are the best, needing around 3.4kg to produce 1kg of flesh, but pigs need 8.4kg for that kilo.

Other academics have calculated that if the grain fed to animals in western countries were consumed directly by people instead of animals, we could feed at least twice as many people – and possibly far more – as we do now.

To make matters worse, our hunger to eat animals has led to overstocking of fragile lands and massive soil erosion and desertification. Overgrazing, from the down lands of southern England to the uplands of Ethiopia and mountains of Nepal, causes great loss of fertility, as well as flooding.

Eating Meat = Overheating the Planet

We humans eat about 230m tonnes of animals a year, twice as much as we did 30 years ago. We mostly breed four species – chickens, cows, sheep and pigs – all of which need vast amounts of food and water, emit methane and other greenhouse gases and produce mountains of physical waste.

But how much stress does our meat-eating put on ecological systems? The answer is a lot but the figures are imprecise and disputed. In 2006, the UN calculated that the combined climate change emissions of animals bred for their meat were about 18% of the global total – more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together.

The authors of the report, called Livestock's Long Shadow, did not just count the methane from the belching, farting cattle, but the gases released from the manures that they produce, the oil burned taking their carcasses to markets often thousands of miles away, the electricity needed to keep the meat cool, the gas used to cook it, the energy needed to plough and harvest the fields that grow the crops that the animals eat, even pumping the water that the cattle need.

The figure was revised upward in 2009 by two World Bank scientists to more than 51%, but attempts to fully account for meat-eating are condemned as simplistic. Should the studies have been based on giant US factory farms, or on more sustainable breeding in Europe? Should you include all the knock-on emissions from clearing forests? What about the fertiliser used to grow the crops to feed to the animals, or the emissions from the steel needed to build the boats that transport the cattle; or the "default" emissions – the greenhouse gases that would be released by substitute activities to grow food if we were to give up meat? And is it fair to count animals used for multiple purposes, as they mostly are in developing countries, from providing draught power to shoe leather or transport, and which only become meat once they reach the end of their economic lives?

It's an accounting nightmare but depending on how it's done, livestock's contribution to climate change can be calculated as low as 5-10% of global emissions or as high as 50%. Last year, a Food Climate Research Network report concluded that UK meat and dairy consumption was responsible for 8% of the country's total greenhouse gas emissions. But however it's counted, livestock farming ranks as one of the three greatest sources of climate changing emissions and one of the largest contributors to environmental degradation.