•Twenty-five hundred gallons of water for each pound of steak.
• For every 10 pounds of healthy grain you put into a cow, you only get out one pound of meat.
• Worldwide, we chop down an acre of rainforest every minute, and lose millions of grasslands acres a year, to feed and graze cattle.
• Cows crap about 65 pounds a day -- that's 12 tons a year.
• Factory farm runoff has poisoned the ground water in 17 states and has polluted 35,000 miles of America's rivers.
• 16% of the greenhouse gas methane comes from animals.
• Monocroppers douse our fields with one billion pounds of toxic pesticides a year.
• Short-sighted practices make the earth lose 24 billion tons of topsoil a year.
• Agricultural runoff is the #1 pollutant of U.S. rivers, killing entire ecosystems and poisoning our groundwater. The EPA says we could save $15 billion worth of water treatment plants if we cut agricultural toxins.
• You need more and more chemicals all the time, to get the same results.
• Monocroppers get huge federal subsidies, no matter how much they produce —a total of $14 billion a year.
• In 2002, the largest 10 percent of farms collected 65 percent of the subsidies;the bottom half got 2 percent — a paltry 256 bucks a year.
• 7 percent of our farms sell 72 percent of our food.
• The average American meal travels 2000 miles from farm to table.
• 15 percent of American kids are overweight —triple the proportion in 1980.
• 30 percent of American adults are overweight.
• Rising cancer rates, especially in children and especially around heavy agricultural areas, show that those toxic pesticides aren't just killing bugs and soil; they're killing people.
• Eating local saves up to 17 times the gas costs of food you buy in the supermarket.
• The organic food market is growing at 25 percent a year.
Source list can be found at http://www.sierraclub.org/truecostoffood/discussionguide.pdf
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