What you eat can have a much bigger impact on the environment than what kind of car you drive. Livestock and manure methane alone directly release greenhouse gases equivalent to what’s produced by thirty-three million cars. But it’s not just the livestock; it’s the resources that go into its production.1
- It takes seven pounds of corn to add one pound of weight to one feedlot head of cattle (and of course, only some of this weight is edible meat). In fact, 66 percent of the grain in production in the United States ends up as livestock feed.
- Grain production creates the heavy use of fertilizers—about one pound of fertilizer use for every three pounds of cooked beef.
- It takes forty-five hundred gallons of water to produce just four ounces of raw beef (precooked weight)
- Sixteen hundred calories of fossil fuel energy are required for every hundred calories of grain-fed beef we eat (compared to fifty calories of fossil fuel for every hundred calories of plant food).
The production of corn-fed or grain-fed beef uses an exceptional amount of fossil fuel. For this reason, one way to have a greener diet is to eat less meat, or at least to switch to organic or pasture- and grass-fed animals—dramatically altering the use of chemical fertilizers, toxic pesticides, and energy.
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