Pesticides

Most pesticide spraying is for farm-animal feed

By WhyStopHarmingAnimals.com

People who worry about pesticides usually picture fruit and vegetables. The heaviest spraying happens somewhere else: on the corn and soy grown to feed farm animals[1]. Most of the world’s farmland is used for animals[9], and so is most of the land sprayed at industrial scale. Federal rules even allow animal feed to carry 2,000 times more glyphosate than many of the foods people eat[5]. A vegan diet needs far less of that land, and far less spray[8].

Corn, soy and the feed trough

Corn and soy take about half of all pesticide use in the United States[1]. A 2023 Faunalytics summary found that about 49% of U.S. pesticides are applied to those two crops alone[1], and most of that harvest is feed[1]. WWF estimates that about 80% of global soy production is fed to farm animals[2], and about 61% of the world’s corn is used as feed too. In the U.S., most soy and about a third of corn become animal feed, according to the USDA[3].

In 2022, World Animal Protection and the Center for Biological Diversity published Collateral Damage, a count of the pesticides applied to U.S. crops grown to feed factory-farmed animals[4]. They found about 235 million pounds of herbicides and insecticides went onto those feed crops in 2018, including about 100 million pounds of glyphosate[4].

The legal limit on feed is 2,000 times higher

The EPA’s table of glyphosate residue tolerances, 40 CFR 180.364, sets the limit for nongrass animal feed (crop group 18) at 400 parts per million[5]. Many human foods on the same table, including artichoke, stone fruit and leafy vegetables, are capped at 0.2 parts per million[5]. 400 divided by 0.2 is 2,000, so the crops grown to fatten farm animals may legally carry two thousand times as much of this herbicide as those foods[5].

A tolerance is the maximum residue the law allows, and a given harvest may carry much less, so the comparison is between legal limits rather than measured residues. The 0.2 limit also applies to many human foods on the table, not every one[5]. The limits themselves are official U.S. regulation, published in the Electronic Code of Federal Regulations[5] and reproduced by Cornell’s Legal Information Institute[6]. If the concern is how much pesticide is allowed on food, the feed is where the rules allow the most.

The land behind it

The spraying follows the land. Poore and Nemecek’s 2018 meta-analysis in Science found that farm animals use about 80% of agricultural land[7] while supplying a minority of calories. In the U.S., White and Hall reported in PNAS in 2018 that feed crops take up roughly 75% of cropland[8]. Without farm animals, most of that land would not need to be planted and sprayed as feed[8].

Eating an animal means growing its feed first and then losing most of those calories as the animal lives and grows. The extra acres needed to make up for that loss are sprayed like any other cornfield. A worldwide vegan diet would shrink farmland from about 4.1 billion hectares to about 1 billion, and the spraying on the land no longer needed would stop with it.

Insects and wildlife

If insects are the concern, the feed fields matter most. Thogmartin and colleagues, in Environmental Research Letters in 2017, found that the loss of milkweed from Midwestern farm fields, driven in large part by glyphosate sprayed on corn and soy, is a major factor in the decline of the monarch butterfly[10]. The study is observational, and it names milkweed loss as a major factor, not the only one[10]. The EPA’s own national-level evaluation found that glyphosate is likely to adversely affect a large majority of the protected species it studied, including plants, insects, fish and other wildlife[11].

Most of these figures are for the United States, and the 49% share covers all corn and soy, including the part not fed to animals[1]. Collateral Damage comes from two advocacy groups[4], though its core finding matches the land and crop-use figures from WWF[2], the USDA[3] and PNAS[8]. Those corn and soy fields exist at this scale because farm animals eat what they grow[1][2]. A plant-based plate needs a fraction of the land, and so a fraction of the spray[8], which makes pesticides one of the stronger reasons to stop eating animals rather than a reason to worry about vegetables.