This is Scientific American 60 Second Science. I'm Cynthia Graber. Got a minute?

Everybody eats and consumers increasingly try to consider the environmental effects of their food choices.

For example, if you want to eat meat, how do your choices compare?

That's what a group of researchers set out to discover, and they found that raising one animal

is dramatically

more environmentally draining than all the others,

cows.

The researchers are the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The scientists noted the challenge in accessing data and creating metrics that can

be compared across livestock and to potato, wheat, and rice production. They settled on national

data from the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, the Interior, and Energy.

The team calculated the production costs by assessing land area, water needs, and fertilizer.

They also analyzed greenhouse gas emissions.

Producing pork, poultry, eggs, and dairy were between two and six times

less efficient than growing potatoes, wheat, and rice. And in the current

agricultural system, beef uses 28 times more land, 11 times more water,

and 6 times more fertilizer than the average

of the other categories of livestock.

Cattle ranching also creates five times more greenhouse gas emissions.

The researchers hope this data will help

consumers make informed choices and policy makers create systems that can

reduce the environmental costs of what we eat. Thanks for the minute. For

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