“What if we didn’t eat animals?” — A Look Into ‘Farmageddon’
My uncle, Jim Purviance, teaches high school freshmen and seniors at Rivercrest High School in Johntown, Texas. Anyone of his students can tell you (even if they’ve been graduated for years) his three classroom rules: 1.) The minute you walk through the door, you enter a dictatorship where Mr. Purviance is the dictator — he has the right to tell you to do anything regarding schoolwork and you must abide; 2.) No phones; 3.) Under no circumstance are you to ask a question which begins with the phrase “what if…”
That third rule may seem a bit off to you. However, it is in place to keep lessons on World Geography and Government simple. If you needed to know the answer to a “what if” scenario, he would’ve given you an explanation in the first place.
Jimbo, you’re going to sigh when you read this, but I’m about to break rule number three.
When I joined my anti-ag and animal activist Facebook groups nearly three years ago, I quickly noticed a trend: the use of “if” and “what if.”
“What if we all agreed to let livestock run wild?”
“If we could eliminate animal agriculture, we could stop global warming.”
“What if we all banded together and agreed to eat plant-based?”
For over 1,000 days, I have read at least one post a day proposing one of these scenarios. Today, we’re going to look at the biggest animal activist “what if” question: what if we didn’t eat animals? I can only hope that when you get to the end of this column, those “what ifs” turn into shocking yet disapproving “Good Lord, I hope nots.”
To fully understand this “what if” scenario, you must first understand the way livestock animals reproduce.
Livestock animals are just like humans in the sense that they do have one mother and one father. However, livestock “fathers” are the epitome of “dead beat dads.” They impregnate multiple females who all live within walking distance of each other then leave said females to raise their child as a single mom. At this point, I find it hard to believe that with the option to specialize in “Animal Law” at Harvard Law School, these dead beats aren’t paying child support yet.
One single rooster (male chicken) may impregnate ten hens (female chickens). One specific boar (male-intact or non-castrated pig) can fertilize 20 sows (female pig who has given birth). One bull (male cow) can spread his seed to 30 cows (female cow who has given birth). All of these numbers represent natural conception — not conception through artificial insemination or embryo transfer. Natural conception was done thousands of years ago before ranchers and farmers even obtained ownership of livestock, it happened before anyone ever thought to purposefully breed livestock. We could completely leave livestock breeding alone and these animals would still create multiple barnyard babies a year.
Now, let’s take a minute to talk about chickens.
The National Chicken Council reported over 9.2 billion broiler chickens produced in the U.S. in 2019, and according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), 855 million chicks were hatched in March 2020 alone. Say 50 percent of those chicks were females, that means 427,500,000 of those chicks are going to reproduce.
Those female chicks turn into pullets (immature female chickens), and those pullets soon turn to hens (sexually mature female chickens) between 4 and 5 months after being hatched. The incubation period for a broiler chicken is 21 days, and ovulation occurs just hours after laying an egg. This means that the 427.5 million hens are going to keep multiplying, and those chicks will mature and multiple, then those chicks will mature and multiply, and so on and so forth.
Just to put it into a little perspective: if those 427.5 million chicks all stay healthy and make it to 47 days old, they would individually weigh an average of 6.32 pounds, according to the National Chicken Council. This means that those 427.5 million chicks, at 47 days old, would weigh roughly 2,710,800,000 pounds — or 1,355,400 tons — or the weight of about 1.3 million 1979 Volkswagen Beetles. That, my friends, is a lot of chickens.
Let’s look at a similar scenario for hogs.
According to the USDA, of the 74.6 million hogs and pigs, 68.2 million were market hogs (meaning they were sent off for slaughter), while 6.33 million were kept for breeding. Now, gilts (a female pig who is under one year of age or has yet to give birth) and sows can only have up to three litters of piglets per year (if timed correctly) with each litter averages 10 piglets. But to simplify the math, we’ll just use the number from one pregnancy.
So, if all 6.33 million of those female pigs did successfully birth an “average” litter of piglets, we would have 63.3 million piglets to provide food, water, shelter, and land for in the U.S.
The average lifetime of a sow is eight years, and if you multiply that number by the average number of piglets per litter, that’s 80 piglets per sow lifetime (if we’re keeping the simplified one litter number). If half of those 80 piglets are female and will reproduce… that would equal 40 sows, all born from one sow, who will produce another 40 sows, who will produce another 40 sows — and the cycle just keeps going.
Fun fact, there’s a website called www.dimensions.guide which allows you to search the average dimensions on just about anything. This website claims that a pig’s body length is about 53 inches. Say we multiply 53 inches by those 63.3 million hogs I mentioned a few paragraphs back, should they all live to be full grown and don’t die of natural causes, that would equal 3,354,900,000 inches— or 52,949.811 Miles — or the circumference of 2.13 Earths. That, my friends, is a lot of hogs.
Let’s conclude this portion of the column by looking at cattle in a similar scenario.
According to the USDA, as of January 1, 2020 all cattle and calves in the U.S. totaled 94.4 million head. Now, this scenario is a bit different because we will not look at how many calves were born and how soon they’ll procreate — this time we’re going to look at the exact opposite: how many head of cattle were slaughtered between January 1, 2019 and January 1, 2020.
“Cattle and calves on feed for the slaughter market in the United States for all feedlots totaled 14.7 million head on January 1, 2020. The inventory is up 2 percent from the January 1, 2019 total of 14.4 million head,” the USDA’s January 1 Cattle Inventory stated.
Say those 14.7 million cattle and calves (cattle who are less than a year old) were not slaughtered. Add 14.7 million head of cattle and calves to the existing 94.4 million head of live cattle, and you get 109,100,000 head of cattle and calves chewing their cud in the United States.
Due to variations in region and the way individual ranches operate, the USDA could not provide an accurate number for how many acres of land one specific cow needs. However, they did provide a number for total acreage used for livestock habitats in the United States.
The USDA reports that 528 million acres of U.S. is attributed to privately owned pastureland while 106 million acres are allocated to “other grazing lands,” which totals 634 million acres of land used for livestock production.
Again, keeping with the “what if” scenario spirit and assuming all current livestock will not die due to natural causes: If we add our current LIVE livestock population numbers listed before — 9.2 billion broiler chickens, 6.33 million hogs, 94.4 million cattle and calves — we get 900,300,730,000… over 900 billion livestock animals, and that number doesn’t include other livestock such as turkeys, sheep, goats, etc.
If you divide 634 million acres by 900,300,730,000, you get .0007 acres per animal. Granted, with current agricultural practices you can put multiple chickens and pigs on one acre of land. But let’s play into the hypothetical again and say that IF livestock population multiplies by a mere 50 percent within the next year… the U.S. would be home to over a trillion barnyard animals all trying to live on 634 million acres.
With a growing population, we now have to ask: where are we going to put all these animals? Which then provokes me to ask: which will YOU sacrifice for livestock to roam first, your home or acreage used for crop production?
Oh, but we can’t sacrifice crop production in this scenario. If anything, we would need MORE acres allocated for crop production seeing that we will need to compensate for the lack of animal products in our diets. Which, just speaking from experience here, my food intake DOUBLED when I went vegan for six weeks and I still couldn’t hit my minimum caloric intake of 1,200 calories per day — and I tried.
So, now that we’ve covered all the bases in that mind-boggling “what if” scenario, I need to answer the question, “What if we didn’t eat animals?”
If we didn’t eat animals, we wouldn’t have enough land to allow them a proper lifestyle. If we didn’t eat animals, we wouldn’t be able to produce enough crops to compensate for the lack of animal products in our diets. If we didn’t eat animals, we wouldn’t be able to create near enough food for the animals to eat themselves… even if we relied solely on a grass-fed diet.
The fact of the matter is: if we didn’t eat animals, they wouldn’t be healthy nor would we. We would, quite literally, be overrun with wild livestock roaming around everywhere — and they wouldn’t like that we were disturbing their peace. It would truly be, as my dear friend Rexanna Powers so delicately puts it, “Farmageddon.”
But, there’s currently nothing to worry about. Lucky for you, this was all just based off of a terrifying “what if,” scenario… however, with the state of agricultural literacy paired with the way anti-ag organizations operate, this could potentially be a reality for my grandchildren. My grandchildren could possibly eat a nutrition-lacking diet while living in a world overpopulated by livestock.
