Crop Deaths & Monocrops

“An animal will die one way or another with whatever way you choose to eat. When plants are grown, the harvest process, pesticides, or machinery will undoubtedly kill countless small animals and insects. Also, more plants means more monocrops, more pesticide use, and the destruction of our ecosystems.”

Does veganism actually cause more harm than good? If that’s the case, then going back to meat would be a no-brainer.

Stop, Crop, and Face the Consequences

There is no disputing that crop deaths are a fact. The closest research I could find on this was a paper stating that an estimated 7.3 billion animals die each year from harvested cropland in the US alone (not including insects).

So time to eat meat, right? Being vegan causes a ton of suffering to these little crop animals, so time to pack up, go home, I’m through?

Hold up. Maths has a couple of things to say about this.

The Inefficient MiddleMammals

The thing is, animals don’t live off the dew of a single ginkgo leaf and the energy of the universe. They eat crops.

As established in the step 2 article about the inefficiency of animal agriculture, livestock are incredibly inefficient biological middlemen. When you look at global agricultural data, the argument that eating plants causes more crop deaths doesn’t hold up as well as I’d hoped:

• The Calorie Loss: Just 55% of the world’s crop calories are actually eaten directly by people. Another 36% is grown specifically to be used for animal feed. In the United States, it’s even worse: just 27% of crop calories are consumed by humans, while more than 67% goes to animal feed.
• The Feed Ratio: With modern farming methods, it takes up to 16 pounds of grain to produce just one pound of beef. This means non-vegans indirectly consume more than 10 times the plant matter of vegans, multiplying the number of field animals killed by machinery in the process.
• The Monocrop Machine: When I’m warned about “monocrops destroying the ecosystem,” I think they are picturing endless miles of identical, heavily sprayed fields that obliterate local biodiversity. But we aren’t eating those crops. Over 90% of US cropland used for field corn is grown exclusively to feed livestock or make ethanol. Factory farming is the economic driver of the monocrop industry.
• The Soy Myth: More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Just 7% is used directly for human foods like tofu, soy milk, and tempeh (a fact heavily corroborated by the US soybean industry itself). The idea that vegans eating tofu is driving monocrop deforestation is a complete misconception.
• The Land Waste: Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world’s supply of calories.
• The Solution: If everyone shifted to a plant-based diet, we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%.

If we ate less meat, vastly less land would be needed to grow animal feed. That land could be returned to natural habitats, drastically reducing the total amount of heavy machinery rolling over fields and minimising overall harm to wildlife.

Perfect is the enemy of progress

“But even if I’m vegan, animals still die. What’s the point?”

I covered this in the article about the perfectionist fallacy.

I’m not vegan to be absolutely, perfectly morally pure. I’m doing it because it’s a practicable, active effort to reduce suffering as far as possible.

I know my footprint on this earth isn’t zero. But I also know that eating tofu instead of a chicken requires drastically less land, fewer monocrops, zero slaughterhouses, and vastly fewer crop deaths overall. When my choice is between “some accidental harm” and “maximum intentional harm,” the decision gets pretty straightforward.