I see crop deaths has popped back up as an anti-vegan argument, with some truly wild claims and figures being thrown about - '10,000 crop deaths for every 1 slaughtered cow', 'crop farming kills WAY more animals a year than livestock farming does' etc.

Let's take a look.

In 2016, the UN estimated that:
300 million cows
450 million goats
550 million sheep
1.5 billion pigs
66 billion chickens
Were slaughtered for human consumption, a total of 68 billion 800 million.

That's 68,800,000,000.

Therefore, if crop deaths really do kill more animals than livestock farming, we're looking at around 70 billion crop deaths annually.

Here's where the science gets murky.

In 2003, Davis and Archer estimated 15 field animal deaths per hectare per year.

Their findings were based on 2 studies, one on mice, one on rats, from which the authors came up with a 60% mortality rate.

Archer (2011), meanwhile, offered a figure of 100 deaths per hectare, based on a study in Australia - but 80% of these deaths were from poisoning.

But for a minute, let's roll with these numbers - as Fischer and Lamey did in the 2018 analysis "Field Deaths in Plant Agriculture".

Averaging the two previously given estimates (15 and 100) and applying that figure to harvested US cropland gives a death toll of 7.3b. Shit!!

That's not much less than the number of chickens killed in the US each year. Maybe these field-animal advocates are onto something.

However, Fischer and Lamey have a number of concerns regarding this data, as summarised on Anthropocene.

https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2018/07/how-many-animals-killed-in-agriculture/

In their paper, Fischer and Lamey, after much detailed discussion, ultimately come up with a cautious new figure - 63.75 million crop deaths a year in the US. This is *less* than the number of cows and pigs slaughtered in the US each year. As below -

Note that last sentence - "It's quite difficult to find diets with a smaller harm footprint, and so many anti-vegan arguments fall apart on empirical grounds."

Looks like crop deaths aren't quite the gotcha so many would love them to be, then.

Fischer and Lamey also put forward a number of recommendations for ways in which this number could be reduced further, such as vertical farming, no tillage, contraception instead of poison etc.

But what about free range, grass fed beef? Is that not a solution?

Well, no. The marketing ploy that is grass fed beef may gain traction among meat eaters and the farmers with a financial interest in ensuring people keep eating lots of beef, but is totally, laughably unscalable. As my friend @awright4645 has explained umpteen times. Moving on...

While there are plenty of ways to reduce crop deaths in agriculture, there aren't plenty of ways to reduce livestock deaths as demand remains high (and is increasing in some areas). If we assume that technology will further reduce accidental mortality, that divide increases.

I'll leave the last words to Fischer and Lamey as my tea is getting cold.

"... field animal deaths are a historically contingent problem that in future will be reduced or eliminated altogether."

I hope we can say the same about livestock slaughter.

Fischer and Lamey, 2018, "Field Deaths in Plant Agriculture"

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://andylamey.com/download/47/&ved=2ahUKEwjv6bbMo67rAhUBRhUIHQBEB4sQFjAEegQIBBAB&usg=AOvVaw1POJiw2lJQ_hqbUU82MKOO

OK, looks like the link to the paper doesn't work. For free access (Springer will charge) visit Lamey's web page and click the link under the 'Papers' bar on the left hand side. http://andylamey.com