The Ecological Impacts of Animal Agriculture

Numbers sometimes tell a story better than words can. First: 86
million. That’s the number of acres planted with corn in the U.S.
Next: 4.35 million — the total number of U.S. acres planted with
vegetables (130,000 of those acres are broccoli). This means that
the acreage of U.S. farmland apportioned to growing vegetables is
a mere 5 percent of what’s devoted to growing corn. That’s a real
problem, since a majority of that corn won’t feed people, but
rather animals — specifically, the approximately 10 billion farm
animals raised and slaughtered in the U.S. each year.
This