The document discusses the environmental impacts of eating meat and dairy products, particularly beef and dairy cows. It notes that animal agriculture uses significant amounts of agricultural land, water, and fossil fuels to produce meat and dairy. Specifically, it states that cows alone use 50% of agricultural land but only provide 18% of calories. It also discusses the water, pollution, deforestation, and greenhouse gas impacts of industrial animal agriculture. The document advocates for eating lower on the food chain to reduce these environmental impacts.

1. Eating Lower on the
Food Chain
Shhh, girls!!
I want to hear
about this!

2. Union of Concerned Scientists: List
of Top Things You Can Do to Help
the Planet
• #1. Drive less
• #2. Eat less red meat and
dairy products
• #3. Conserve on heating and
cooling costs in the
home

3. Cow products are the worst!
• Nearly 87% of our agricultural land
(50% for cows alone!) is engaged in
animal production for food
I BEG
YOUR
PARDON
?

4. U.S. Crop % that goes to feed cows
• 80 - 90% of our
soybeans, oats,
wheat and corn
What! You have a problem with
that?

5. Cow efficiency
• It takes 16 lbs of wheat to make 1 lb of
cow
• 5000 gallons of water per lb of cow
• (A lb of soybeans only takes about 260
gallons of water)

6. • A typical North American Diet requires twice
as much water to produce as less meat-
intensive diets common in Asia and Europe.
• Eating lower on food chain : same water
could feed double the people
• Making animal products use ½ the water in
US
• 1 dairy cow drinks about 29 gallons of water
a day, and needs 40 additional gallons for
sanitation, producing only 8 gallons of milk
Got Water?

7. Pollution (Deep Doo-Doo!)
• EPA : agricultural runoff = primary pollution source for
60% of U.S. polluted rivers and streams
• Animal ag. = 130 times more than human waste and
equivalent to 5 tons per person.
• AND ITS NOT TREATED BY A SEWAGE TREATMENT
PLANT!
• The manure from a 200-head dairy operation produces
as much nitrogen as sewage from a town of 10,000
people!
• One dairy cow produces 120 lbs of waste a day, 12
times as much as a person
• This is a total of 22 tons per cow per year.

8. Got Trees?
• Eating a plant based
diet personally saves
an acre of trees
annually
• 260 million acres of
U.S. forests have
been cleared for
livestock production.

9. Our foreign suppliers
• Throughout Central and South America,
grazing and feed grain production are the
leading economic forces behind rainforest
destruction.
• Every quarter lb hamburger costs Mother
Nature 55 square feet of forest land!
• U.S. is the world’s top beef importer.
• A fast food restaurant can claim to buy
from a U.S. supplier but suppliers are not
required to declare the nation
of origin of their products.

10. Got Petroleum?
• Americans consume nearly as much fossil
fuels at the supermarket as at the gas pump.
• The typical American burns about 530
gallons of gas each year driving.
• Eating a meat based diet gobbles up an
additional 400 gallons of oil.

11. • One acre of corn requires 140 gallons
of oil to produce.
• Eating corn directly maximizes the
energy investment.
• If the corn goes to livestock, only
about a fifth of the protein is returned
as food, four-fifths is lost

12. Additional tidbits
• One quarter of all antibiotics produced are
used in the U.S. for food animals
• Foreign originated veggies may have been
sprayed with DDT
• L.A. water is full of DDT, washed off from
foreign fruits and veggies!
• DDT is stored in fat – linked to breast
cancer (90% breast cancer patients have
DDT in their systems)