BeefProduction of beef requires a lot of energy and leaves a huge carbon footprint on planet earth. The beef production process goes far beyond raising livestock. It involves intensive use of water, immense amounts of land to grow wheat and/or corn, and requires an almost infinite amount of transportation. We must consider not only the amount of land physically occupied by cattle, but also the amount of land used to grow the enormous amount of food they require. To put that into perspective, beef production uses “30% of the Earth’s land mass” (Peta 2013). Additionally, it takes 31.5 kWh of energy to produce 1 pound of beef, with approximately 58 pounds of CO2 emissions (Federal Register 2010). Speaking of energy, the amount of grain fed to livestock is incredibly high. Including beef and dairy cattle, if all that feed “were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million” (Pimentel, David 2014). And yet another aspect of this, perhaps an externality effect on the environment is deforestation, dehydration of land, and contamination of water sources due to runoff. Another aspect we looked at was water consumption, direct consumption of water by livestock, but indirect consumption through the food they eat. The crops themselves also require a lot of water. Combining agricultural water for beef cattle and direct water consumption results in “nearly half of the water used in the United States” being used exclusively for the beef cattle industry. To put this into perspective and to understand how much “50%” of American water use amounts to, let's look at the following. .half of paper ...cattle are slaughtered, they must be transported to meat processing plants which is the sixth stage of this process. The final phase of this process, phase seven, involves trucking the now-processed meat to grocery stores and restaurants to be sold and consumed. It's clear that the meat we love to eat is much more than just beef. Every pound of meat we eat involves this exhaustive process. This all boils down to the fact that beef is the least efficient protein in the world with “beef cattle production requiring an energy input to protein production ratio of 54:1” (Pimental, David 2013). http://www.beefcentral.com/top-25/article/4073 http://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/meat-wastes-natural-resources http://www. news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-million-people-grain-livestock-eat http://www.journalofanimalscience.org/content/73/8/2483.full.pdf