• It takes about 300 gallons of water per day to produce food for a vegan, and more than 4,000 gallons of water per day to produce food for a meat-eater.

• You save more water by not eating a pound of beef than you do by not showering for an entire year.

• Food for a vegan can be produced on only 1/6 of an acre of land, while it takes 3 1/4 acres of land to produce food for a meat-eater.

• Vegans and vegetarians save more than 100 animals a year per person.

• In the U.S., 70 percent of all grains, 80 percent of all agricultural land, half of all water resources, and one-third of all fossil fuels are used to raise animals for food.
• Eating animals destroys the rain forest. Most environmentalists are aware that the Amazon has been slashed and burned in order to create grazing space for cows. But perhaps an even greater threat is the destruction of rain forest in order to create land where feed is grown for factory-farmed animals in wealthy nations. A recent report by Greenpeace blamed the chicken-flesh industry for leading the way in destroying the Amazon.

• Animals raised for food produce 130 times as much excrement as the entire U.S. population, roughly 89,000 pounds per second, all without the benefit of waste treatment systems.
• According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, animals on factory farms in America produce 20 tons of fecal matter each year for every U.S. household
• A pig farm with 5,000 animals produces as much fecal waste as a city of 50,000 people.
• A contamination study conducted by John Chastain, a Minnesota agricultural extension engineer, reports, “The data indicates that the pollution strength of raw manure is 160 times greater than raw municipal sewage.In other words, farmed animal waste is much more dangerous than human waste. There are no federal guidelines that regulate how factory farms treat, store, and dispose of the trillions of pounds of concentrated, untreated animal excrement that they produce each year.
• The EPA reports that chicken, hog, and cattle excrement have polluted 35,000 miles of rivers in 22 states and contaminated groundwater in 17 states. (And that’s just in the U.S.)
• The EPA reports that roughly 80 percent of ammonia emissions in the United States come from animal waste.
• A 2006 United Nations report found that the meat industry produces more greenhouse gases than all the SUVs, cars, trucks, planes, and ships in the world combined!

And if global planetary destruction is not really a concern to you, how about world  hunger?

• The world’s cattle alone consume a quantity of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people—more than the entire human population on Earth.

• About 20 percent of the world’s population, or 1.4 billion people, could be fed with the grain and soybeans fed to U.S. cattle alone.

The single most powerful choice we can make for the preservation of our planet is to stop eating animal products.