I wonder how the magnitude of these various effects would scale between 1 additional percent of the population going vegan vs. 10 percent vs. 100 percent.
Specifically, at least in the medium run, it seems that many of the inputs of producing crops are sunk costs, and that a reduction in the demand for farmed animal feed would cause agricultural producers to keep growing many crops but try to sell them as biofuel material. At least here in the US, Big Corn is powerful and could probably get Congress to mandate / subsidize more biofuel use to a certain point. Or they could probably get some other method to maintain a crop market and keep the farmers / ag lobby content, again to a certain point.
So I am not confident a small-to-medium refuction in animal feed demand would ultimately impact crop acreage that much. I don’t know about other markets though!
The same crops are already used for bioethanol before being sold and fed to farmed animals, as distillers grains. Decreasing animal product consumption could therefore reduce bioethanol revenues from selling the byproducts for feed, but it could also reduce input grain costs.
I wonder how the magnitude of these various effects would scale between 1 additional percent of the population going vegan vs. 10 percent vs. 100 percent.
Specifically, at least in the medium run, it seems that many of the inputs of producing crops are sunk costs, and that a reduction in the demand for farmed animal feed would cause agricultural producers to keep growing many crops but try to sell them as biofuel material. At least here in the US, Big Corn is powerful and could probably get Congress to mandate / subsidize more biofuel use to a certain point. Or they could probably get some other method to maintain a crop market and keep the farmers / ag lobby content, again to a certain point.
So I am not confident a small-to-medium refuction in animal feed demand would ultimately impact crop acreage that much. I don’t know about other markets though!
The same crops are already used for bioethanol before being sold and fed to farmed animals, as distillers grains. Decreasing animal product consumption could therefore reduce bioethanol revenues from selling the byproducts for feed, but it could also reduce input grain costs.
Great point, Jason!
I agree confidence is not warranted.
It looks like there is significant variation across countries (the relevant metric is per capita production, but I did not immediately find it):