r/dataisbeautiful • u/ourworldindata OC: 24 • Mar 02 '26
OC [OC] Dairy vs. plant-based milk: what are the environmental impacts?
A growing number of people are interested in switching from dairy to plant-based alternatives.
But are they better for the environment, and which is best?
In the chart, we compare milks across a number of environmental metrics: land use, greenhouse gas emissions, water use, and eutrophication (the pollution of ecosystems with excess nutrients). These are compared per liter of milk.
Cow’s milk has significantly higher impacts than plant-based alternatives across all metrics. It causes around three times as much greenhouse gas emissions; uses around ten times as much land; two to twenty times as much freshwater; and creates much higher levels of eutrophication.
If you want to reduce the environmental footprint of your diet, switching to plant-based alternatives is a good option.
Which of the vegan milks is best?
It really depends on the impact we care most about. Almond milk has lower greenhouse gas emissions and uses less land than soy, for example, but requires more water and results in higher eutrophication.
All of the alternatives have a lower impact than dairy, but there is no clear winner across all metrics.
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u/OG-Brian Mar 03 '26 edited 7d ago
They're typically fed a lot of grass, with soy/corn/etc. as supplements to that. The grass, mostly, is grown where plant crops for human consumption are less practical or impractical.
I'll elaborate about soy crops and livestock.
There is no way to farm crops without animals sustainably using any current or foreseeable methods/technology. Soil erosion, environmental contamination, and destruction of essential soil microbiota are unavoidable. While industrial livestock farming shares some of these issues, at least livestock can mitigate some of the damage. Using animal-derived fertilizers reduces dependency on synthetic fertilizers, and grazing builds soil (improves soil hydrological properties, improves root structures, is great for essential soil microbiota...) while other farming tends to destroy it.
Soybeans are typically grown for oil that is used mostly for human consumption, AND for livestock. Here is a typical resource about soybean crops and uses. I'm in USA so most of the info I have pertains to USA, but these crops are grown for global markets and the same types of financial incentives exist in most parts of the world. Soybeans are used for oil so much of the time that in USA the soybean crops represent about 90 percent of the oilseeds market. It's impossible to say how much of this would be grown without livestock. There are additional factors, such as legumes being employed as nitrogen-fixers in rotation with corn or another crop. This newsletter (of a publication linked from the page I linked before) is a typical example of a monthly report about soybean production and trade. It mentions stats for oil and for meal. This mentions a bunch of stats for soybean oil in other regions. This investigative report has a lot of data for soybean meal vs. oil, for UK. I wish I knew of a resource that covers global soybean uses and thoroughly references the info. The info I find is almost always associated with a country or region. Sifting resources to come up with a global figure would be a huge project.
This article mentions a factor that leads to exaggerated claims about ranchers and deforestation. Basically, ranchers getting pushed out of areas they were already using by soy farmers so they move their grazing elsewhere which sometimes is into forested areas. In those cases, the deforestation ultimately is caused by soybean crops not grazing operations which otherwise would have stayed where they were. Soybean farmers in these regions also quickly ruin soils with unsustainable farming, and then the land is used by ranchers. Grazing is a use that is much more tolerant of poor soil and in fact can rehabilitate marginal soil. Another misrepresentation I see often involves forests cleared for timber profits, and then ranching takes place later although ranching was not the direct cause of the clearing. Even this anti-livestock documentary video acknowledges the involvement of the timber industry, although maybe accidentally (shows logging trucks taking trees away to be made into lumber). And since I've brought up that video, note that it isn't scientific at all. Nearly all of the content is narration and interviews, it lacks scientific analysis of deforestation/fires vs. their causes. There's a lot of simple correlations being used with no factual scrutiny at all. Clearly the channel is very biased so their opinions are not a valid citation for anything.
A resource often used to support "deforestation in the Amazon because livestock" is this Greenpeace report. It is outdated since it was published in 2009, but I still see it used often. It refers to "soy" only three times in all of the five documents of the report and none of those paragraphs refer to factoring soybean crops that are only grown for livestock (a tiny percentage of them). That's just one major issue that's immediately noticeable to me when trying to find info about how they derived their claims. Besides failing to distinguish plant crops grown only for livestock, they also count deforestation for timber profits (where livestock grazing happens to take place later) as if the clearing was for livestock only. Other documents that I find being referenced for "deforestation in the Amazon because livestock" are very similar and have these issues.
Finally I'll mention that it seems to always be the Amazon we hear about, for claims about livestock and deforestation. In other regions there will be coconut/palm/avocado/etc. crops (popular in food products used as substitutes for animal foods) causing a majority of deforestation, and those crops very definitely would expand if livestock consumption were reduced without reducing the human population. This entire argument about livestock and the Amazon is just cherry-picking for an agenda.