Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
roasting the atmosphere, one chicken at a time
beef gets a bad wrap when it comes to the environment—and
rightfully so when you consider the industry's culpability in defores-
tation, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. but what about
chicken?
you could drive to the moon and back 114,000 times and
still have released less carbon than the u.s. chicken industry does
annually.
if you want to reduce your ecological footprint, eating
chickens instead of cattle is not the answer.
CO
2
emissions to produce
per-capita
chickens consumed in the
year
u.s. population
u.s. chicken
u.s. in miles driven by a
consumption
24-mpg car
1970
203,302,031
36.6 lbs
16,600,000,000 miles
1980
226,545,805
45.8 lbs
23,040,000,000 miles
1990
248,709,873
59.5 lbs
18,300,000,000 miles
2000
281,421,906
76.9 lbs
32,900,000,000 miles
2010
299,862,000
83.5 lbs
55,800,000,000 miles
ing cleared for export beef production and the production of soy for
animal feed. David Kaimowitz, director general of the Center for In-
ternational Forestry Research, reported in 2004 that rapid growth
in Brazilian beef overseas has been accelerating destruction of the
Amazon and that the area of forest loss increased from 41.5 million
hectares in 1990 to 58.7 million hectares—an area twice the size of
Portugal—in 2000. “In a nutshell,” said Kaimowitz, “cattle ranch-
ers are making mincemeat out of Brazil's Amazon rainforests.”
Loss of biodiversity from these forests is only part of the problem,
as clearing forests for pasture land and to grow feed crops releases
some 2.4 billion tons of CO
2
into the atmosphere annually. Since
South American forests and grasslands (which are also in danger
from cattle ranching, the construction of slaughter plants, and soy
production) act as “carbon sinks,” they can soak up and seques-
ter CO
2
, which is crucial to lessening our emissions. When forests
and grasslands are cut down, however, all of their stored carbon is
