Learn · Going vegan
More ways your choices help animals
Every resident at Sage Mountain is here because of choices someone made on their behalf. Diet is one of the biggest levers any of us can pull for animals, land, and water. Here's what that looks like over time, based on real, cited research rather than round numbers.
The vegan impact calculator
See what adds up over time
Drag the slider to see the estimated environmental impact of a vegan diet over time, starting in months, then years.
Each figure below comes from a different real source rather than one recycled "commonly cited" statistic. We'd rather show you fewer numbers we can stand behind than more we can't.
Water (657 gal/day, average U.S. diet vs. vegan diet): GRACE Communications Foundation Water Footprint Calculator, which combines USDA consumption statistics with the peer-reviewed water-footprint values in Mekonnen & Hoekstra, "A Global Assessment of the Water Footprint of Farm Animal Products," Ecosystems 15 (2012).
Land (≈30 sq ft/day of cropland, meat-based vs. lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet): Pimentel & Pimentel, "Sustainability of meat-based and plant-based diets and the environment," American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 78 (2003). That study compares to a vegetarian diet (which still uses land for dairy and eggs), not a fully vegan one, so this likely understates real savings. A 2018 Science meta-analysis of 38,000 farms found a full shift to vegan diets would cut global agricultural land use by about 75%. See Our World in Data, on Poore & Nemecek (2018).
CO2 (≈9.5 lbs/day, meat-heavy diet vs. vegan diet): Scarborough et al., Climatic Change 125 (2014), corroborated by a larger 2023 follow-up (55,504 people) in Nature Food, which found vegans' overall footprint is roughly a quarter of a high meat-eater's.
Land animals (≈25/year, mostly chickens): Harish Sethu's analysis of USDA slaughter data. This is independent analysis, not a peer-reviewed study, though it's built directly on the same government slaughter statistics the peer-reviewed estimates use, and it's U.S.-specific, which matters, since Americans eat far more chicken per capita than the global average. Animal Charity Evaluators, a research nonprofit, separately estimated about 12 land animals per plant-based year using 2018 global data, lower mainly because it averages in countries that eat far less meat than the U.S. does. We use the U.S. figure since it better reflects our visitors.
Fish & shellfish (≈346–557/year): also from Sethu's analysis, combining USDA and NOAA seafood data. It dwarfs the land-animal number mostly because of "feed fish," small wild-caught fish ground up to feed farmed fish and shrimp, and bycatch, animals unintentionally caught and killed without being eaten at all. We show it as a range, not a single number, because those two categories are the least certain part of the whole estimate.