How Ending Factory Farming Could Help Eradicate Global Nutrient Scarcity

80% of our agriculture is used to feed livestock.

With over half of the population suffering from nutrient scarcity, it is something we do not speak enough about or recognize as affecting our everyday lives. A major reason is due to our agricultural inefficiencies. As a society, we have accepted that eating meat is an essential and primary source of our needed nutrients, prioritizing meat over everything else. Westernized culture especially has created this focus on meat and protein when in fact, meat production uses too many resources, is unethical, and is an inefficient way for us to receive all the nutrients we need for a healthy lifestyle. 

We will delve deeper into this topic to show how livestock and factory farming in particular, have become major obstacles to an efficient and accessible food supply.

What is nutrient scarcity?

Global nutrient scarcity is a term referring to how the majority of the population is lacking proper nutrients to properly function cognitively and physically and live a healthy lifestyle.

According to the Lancet global health research on the subject, over 4 billion people are lacking important nutrients for good health. There is still a lot of complexity and research to be done on nutrient scarcity, but their findings were that “more than 5 billion people do not consume enough iodine (68% of the global population), vitamin E (67%), and calcium (66%). More than 4 billion people do not consume enough iron (65%), riboflavin (55%), folate (54%), and vitamin C (53%)” (Passarelli, 2024).

They concluded that “deficiencies in these [nutrients] and other micronutrients collectively contribute to a large burden of morbidity and mortality.” (Passarelli, 2024) All over the world, men and women are deficient in nutrients that are highly available in non-animal products, such as fruits, vegetables, and grains.

How Factory Farming is Affecting our Nutrient Consumption

You may be asking then, how does eating meat and factory farming contribute to this nutrient scarcity? Well, it's not only because, as a society, we simply aren't eating enough vegetables, fruits, grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds by prioritizing meat and animal products. It is also because meat production takes away thousands and thousands of acres of useful land and crops that could be used more efficiently to create more food sources. 

If we look at the planet as a whole, we do not have much land mass. Once we remove the oceans, glaciers, and barren land, we are left with a limited amount of habitable land (20% of the planet).

We can see that “45% of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture” (Ritchie, 2019).

Therefore, roughly 10% of the planet is used for agriculture.

But where is all this food actually going?

A staggering 80% of agriculture is used to feed animals -- not people.

To say it simply, we are growing crops primarily to feed animals, so we can then eat them in massive quantities. This results in less crops for humans, less nutrient varieties for humans, as well as huge amounts of land being used to focus on one specific kind of nutrient, protein which we can get as efficiently in non-animal sources. 

Why Is Feeding Animals Instead of People So Inefficient?

Four main issues are brought up by Bruce Friedrich, the Executive Director at The Good Food institute (Yale CBEY, 2016) :

• Livestock creates a caloric loss leading to food insecurity 

• Livestock farming creates serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global 

• The “overconsumption of meat is a recognized public health concern.” 

• The unethical treatment of employees and animals in the production industry.

A large percentage of our agricultural land is used for things other than directly producing human food. This is because agriculture is used “to grow crops for biofuels and other industrial products, and an even more significant share is used to feed livestock” (Ritchie, 2019).

Feeding animals such as cows, pigs, and poultry all takes enormous amounts of grains to feed and keep them alive, yet we only let them live very short lives to then kill them for food. It has been repeatedly shown that growing plants that provide nutrients we need, like protein, is more environmentally and economically efficient than feeding animals to get those nutrients through the animals. 

Our World in Data notes that every “100 kilocalories you feed a cow, you only get 2 kilocalories of beef back.” (Ritchie, 2021) The industry also tries to find ways to minimize these costs as much as possible with selective breeding. And billions of animals are killed every year. The entire system is a flawed and unethical one. 

On top of the food loss that could be given directly to humans, the land that we use could be used to grow a vast variety of food that could feed millions of people at an affordable scale.

“If the world adopted a plant-based diet, we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares” (Ritchie, 2021) and STILL have plenty of food for everyone on the planet.

This is the case because factory farms and livestock production use so much space and resources to produce food: “it takes 50 to 100 times as much land to produce a kilocalorie of beef or lamb versus… peas or tofu.” (Ritchie, 2021).

In this graph, we can see that we currently use over 4 billion hectares for agriculture and that over half of this is for pastures for cows and sheep. Simply reducing beef consumption could free up a significant amount of land because these pastures take up so much space. This land could then potentially be used for agriculture that would feed humans directly.

A big example of this is the amount of cereals we produce, which is immense, but only a portion of them is actually fed directly to humans because so much is used to feed the animals we will eventually eat.

A More Efficient Way to Get our Nutrients 

A big realization to have is the inefficiency of land use and the harm done to the animals in the process of factory farming. The nutrients we are lacking, such as iodine, vitamin C, fiber, calcium, and many more, can all be incorporated more efficiently through non-animal sources. 

Reducing meat and animal products in the diet is also healthier. A 2017 study published in JAMA showed that "consuming just 3% less animal protein and replacing it with plant protein was associated with up to a 19% lower risk of death from any cause” (Song, 2016).

The problem is not simply that the world does not have enough food or nutrients. 

When so much of our agricultural system is dedicated to feeding animals so that we can eventually eat them, we lose an enormous amount of potential food and nutrients along the way. 

We need to change the way we produce food by using our land and resources to feed people more directly, creating a food system that is more efficient, healthier, more sustainable, and less harmful to animals.

Works Cited

Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2019) - “Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260611-075803/global-land-for-agriculture.html' [Online Resource] (archived on June 11, 2026).

Hannah Ritchie (2021) - “If the world adopted a plant-based diet, we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260812-123851/land-use-diets.html' [Online Resource] (archived on August 12, 2026).

Passarelli S, Free C, Shepon A et al. (2024). Global estimation of dietary micronutrient inadequacies: a modelling analysis. The Lancet Global Health; 12, e1590-e1599

Song, M., Fung, T. T., Hu, F. B., Willett, W. C., Longo, V. D., Chan, A. T., & Giovannucci, E. L. (2016). Association of Animal and Plant Protein Intake With All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality. JAMA internal medicine, 176(10), 1453–1463. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.4182

Yale CBEY. (2016). Disrupting Meat. Retrieved from https://cbey.yale.edu/our-stories/disrupting-meat