Pretty good argument and logic on reddit/r/vegan today. thanks anachronic

Tofu vs Beef quantified. How many pounds of each you can you get from 1 acre of farmland. (self.vegan)

submitted  ago by anachronic [+1]

I did some googling & math and this is what I found (with citations). I’d appreciate your thoughts, corrections, or comments.

Let’s assume the protein in 1 pound of tofu is roughly equivalent to the protein in 1 pound of beef (I know they’re not exactly equal, but close enough for this exercise)

Organic tofu takes the most land to produce and one pound of organic tofu requires .00017 of an acre to produce[1], meaning that you can get ~5800lbs of tofu out of 1 acre of soybeans.

Wiki Answers says that you can get 30-50 bushels of wheat (@ 60lbs per bushel)[2] out 1 acre. If we assume it’s good year and we produced 50 bushels, that’s 3000lbs of wheat per acre. Divide by 13lbs (it takes ~13lbs of wheat to get 1 pound of beef[3] ) to get 230lbs of beef per acre of wheat (in a good year).

In summary:

  • You can get over 5000lbs of tofu from one acre of soy

  • Or you can get ~230lbs of beef out of one acre of wheat

This is why people say we can put a dent in world hunger by going vegan…. each acre of farmland would produce almost 20x more protein than it currently is.

 

Tofu vs Beef quantified. How many pounds of each you can you get from 1 acre of farmland. : vegan.