Climate change: With rising temperatures, rising sea levels, melting ice caps and glaciers, shifting ocean currents and weather patterns, climate change is the most serious challenge facing the human race. The livestock sector is a major player, responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2 equivalent." Livestock are also responsible for almost two-thirds (64 percent) of anthropogenic ammonia emissions, which contribute significantly to acid rain and acidification of ecosystems
Water: The livestock sector is a key player in increasing water use, accounting for over 8 percent of global human water use, mostly for the irrigation of feed crops. It is probably the largest sectoral source of water pollution, contributing to "dead" zones in coastal areas, "red tide", degradation of coral reefs, human health problems, emergence of antibiotic resistance and many others. The major sources of pollution are from animal wastes, antibiotics and hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers and pesticides used for feed crops, and sediments from eroded pastures.
Land degradation: Expansion of livestock production is a key factor in deforestation, especially in Latin America where the greatest amount of deforestation is occurring --" 70 percent of previous forested land in the Amazon is occupied by pastures, and feed crops cover a large part of the remainder.
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                          Dairy farm runoffs, courtesy USDA
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The Natural Resources Defense Council warns " On factory farms, animals are highly confined into relatively small areas; their manure and urine are funneled into massive waste lagoons. These cesspools often break, leak or overflow, sending dangerous microbes, nitrate pollution and drug-resistant bacteria into water supplies. Factory-farm lagoons also emit toxic gases such as ammonia, hydrogen sulfide and methane. What's more, the farms often spray the manure onto land, ostensibly as fertilizer -- these "sprayfields" bring still more of these harmful substances into our air and water."
To produce a pound of wheat takes about 25 gallons of water, a lot of sun and less than an acre of land. Yet it takes 16 pounds of that wheat (plus soy) and 2,500 gallons of water fed to a cow to make one pound of beef. More than half our farmland and half our water consumption is currently devoted to the meat industry
Shawn Dell Joyce writes that it takes one sixth of an acre of land to produce enough food for a vegan but more than three acres to feed a meat eater. That is a factor of 18! But according to the British group Vegfam.A 10-acre farm could feed 60 people growing soybeans, 24 people growing wheat, 10 people growing corn but only two producing cattle. That is more like a factor of 30!
 We eat most of our grain in the form of meat, 90 percent actually, which translates into 2,000 pounds of grain a year.
"The way that we breed animals for food is a threat to the planet. It pollutes our environment while consuming huge amounts of water, grain, petroleum, pesticides and drugs." David Brubaker, PhD, Center for a Livable Future, Johns Hopkins University.
The meal plan of the average American family accounts for 2.8 tons of CO@ emitted annually, compared with 2.2 tons for driving. Worldwide agriculture contributes some 30% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, far more than transportation. So when it comes to cutting your carbon footprint today, the truth is that what you eat is as important as what you drive."If you can't drive a Prius", says Jonathan Kaplan of the Natural Resources Defense Council," you can certainly eat like one".
Many of those who have begun to understand the death sentence of global grain production have responded by becoming vegetarians. But vegetarians who continue to consume milk and eggs scarcely reduce their impact on the ecosystem. The conversion efficiency of dairy and egg production is generally better than meat rearing, but even if everyone who now eats beef were to eat cheese instead, this would merely delay the global famine and offer no answer to animal suffering.
As both dairy cattle and poultry are fed fishmeal and ground up animal parts (which means that no one can claim to eat cheese but not fish or animals), it might, in one respect, even accelerate it.
The shift would be accompanied too by a massive deterioration in animal welfare: with the possible exception of intensively reared broilers and pigs, battery chickens and dairy cows who already suffer the most and whose tortured existence cannot get much worse.
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