Question

Is my math correct? A question about the impacts of vegan and omnivorous diets.

I am writing a speech about veganism, and I found a statistic saying that to feed a single vegan in a year, it would only require 1/6 of an acre of land, and for a typical American omnivore, it would require 3.25 acres. One acre is 0.00404686 sq km, and I m using a world population value of 7,365,455,150 people. Also, there are 16,163,000 sq km of arable land on the Earth. So, am I correct in saying that if everyone on the Earth were vegan, it would only require 4,967,830 sq km of land (~31% of the world s arable land), and if everyone on the Earth ate like a typical American omnivore, it would require 96,872,700 sq km of land (~599% of the world's arable land)?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Yes you are right.

Explanation:

So far, there seems to be no problem in your computations and assumptions. As a rule of thumb, a vegan needs one unit of land to have his/her food, a carnivore needs ten units of land. Of course, an omnivore needs in between (based on his/her diet).

Yes, world population is almost 7.4 billion and increasing (census.gov). There are some agricultural developments, such as cultivating rice and growing fish at the same time. Greenhouses have been increasing in numbers and sizes.

Another fact that naturally caught fish (non farm fish) reached its upper limit.

Yes you are correct.