Agriculture can be a powerful force for good. It alleviates hunger, provides jobs and allows for productive, healthy individuals and societies. Of course, food systems have some human failings too. Malnutrition still exists, over-nutrition is a growing concern, food isn’t always equitably provided or sold, and regional over-reliance leaves communities at risk of various shock factors.

Despite the positives it brings, agriculture also undeniably negatively affects the planet. Our current food systems are wholly unsustainable and carry a disproportional impact on land use, water use, greenhouse gas emissions, nitrogen and phosphorus use and thus, by extension, also upon ocean acidification, biosphere integrity/biodiversity and biogeochemical flows. There will always be an environmental impact associated with agriculture. Still, the challenge is to reduce this impact to the minimum possible whilst meeting nutritional demands sustainably and equitably.

Methods of achieving this are well known. Some of the most impactful actions include reducing our food waste, increasing the biodiversity of crops grown, reducing pesticide use, protecting smallholder rights, consuming seasonal and local produce (such as by maximising urban farming), making technological improvements (such as drip irrigation), substituting large amounts of synthetic fertiliser for organic fertiliser and protecting the commons.

Even within the current framework, but especially if the aforementioned actions are implemented, the most impactful change is likely veganism. Swapping animal agriculture for vegan agriculture is an order of magnitude more efficient due to basic ecological facts. As each level of the trophic system requires ~10 times the resource input per resource output, animal agriculture requires more land use (especially for grazing animals, but also for crops grown for factory-farmed animals), water use, fossil fuel use (from farm equipment and transportation), greenhouse gas emissions, fertiliser use, pesticide use and produces much more waste. This is not even to mention additional antimicrobial use or the horrors caused upon sentient beings.

Thus, the challenge is getting people to eat vegan food as a priority (which should be followed by sustainably intensifying crop production). Some actions are practical such as decreasing/removing subsidies on animal products, removing VAT on produce/subsidising produce, encouraging veganism as an opt-out, rather than an opt-in system, developing and making vegan offerings at supermarkets and restaurants more visible and spreading conversations about veganism across all forms of media and communication.

Veganism, like other social movements grounded in expanding existing rights to new groups of individuals, has a tipping point. At this point, veganism will be viewed as the norm, and eating animal products will be viewed negatively. At the ‘second tipping point’, veganism will have enough popular support to become legally mandated. At both points, significant improvements in agricultural sustainability can be expected.

To get to this point of food system change, it will be helpful to convince individuals to become vegan for any valid reason, so long as this is grounded in truth. Although the environmental impacts of veganism might be enough to change the environmentally conscious and should be used as a vital tool in the vegan activist’s arsenal, the reframing of animals as sentient stakeholders not only within the biosphere but also within themselves is necessary.

By acknowledging that sentient beings deserve moral consideration, we necessarily conclude that animal agriculture is immoral. As a consequence, one boycotts animal agriculture in favour of plant-based foods. This is a win for the animals, the environment, and society’s ability to provide adequate nutrition for a growing population.