Sunday, January 31, 2010

Weekly Facts and figures.

What could a dietary shift away from grain-fed beef to vegetarianism do in the United States?
It could spell a reduction of more than fifty percent in total demands for land and fertilizer in the Mississippi Basin, with no change in total production of human food protein. There is a large “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, caused by agricultural nitrates and nitrogen that enter the Gulf from the Mississippi River; with a fifty-percent reduction, levels of those pollutants would shrink to the levels that there were when the dead zone was small or nonexistent.


What does livestock production do to floodplains and water tables?
It dries up floodplains and lowers water tables. What does this mean? That it’s harder for people to grow plants, harder for people to get water for drinking and other purposes, harder for plants to survive, harder for farmed animals to survive, harder for wild animals to survive—in short, harder for people to survive.
Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options (2006; PDF; 4.8 megabytes), by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.



Wish I could take credit for this research myself but it from one of the websites/ Blogs that I follow

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