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Recommended: Effects meat consumption has on the environment

Beef
The production of beef produces requires a lot of energy and leaves a huge carbon footprint on planet earth. The process of producing beef goes far beyond raising cattle. It includes heavy water use, immense amounts of land to grow grain and/or corn, and requires an almost endless amount transportation. We have to consider not only the amount of land the cattle physically occupy, but also the amount of land used to grow the huge amount of food they require. To put it into perspective, the production of beef uses “30% of the earth’s land mass” (Peta 2013). In addition, it takes 31.5kWh of energy to produce 1lb of beef, approximately 58lbs of CO2 emissions (Federal Register 2010). Speaking of energy, the amount of grain fed to cattle is staggeringly high. Including beef cattle and dairy cattle if all that feed “were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million" (Pimentel, David 2014). And yet another aspect of this, perhaps an externality effect on the environment is deforestation, land dehydration, and contamination of water sources from runoff.
Another aspect we looked at was water consumption. The amount of water required to raise cattle for beef is shockingly high. And a lot of this is not only due to the direct consumption of water by the cattle, but the indirect consumption through the food they eat. The crops themselves require a lot of water as well. Combine the water for agriculture for the beef cattle and the direct consumption of water and we find that “nearly half of the water used in the United States” is strictly used for the beef cattle industry. To put this into perspective, and to understand what “50%” of American water use looks like, let’s look at the followin...

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...attle are slaughtered, they must be transported to meat-processing plants which is step six of this process. The final step of this process, step seven, involves the process of trucking the now processed meat to grocery stores and restaurants to be sold and consumed. It is clear to see that the beef we love to eat is more than just beef. Each pound of beef we eat involves this exhaustive process. This all boils down to beef being the least efficient protein in the world with “beef cattle production requir[ing] an energy input to protein output ratio of 54:1” (Pimental, David 2013). http://www.beefcentral.com/top-25/article/4073 http://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/meat-wastes-natural-resources http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-million-people-grain-livestock-eat http://www.journalofanimalscience.org/content/73/8/2483.full.pdf

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