Is soy grown mostly for animals or for people?
Here it is, the “ultimate soy response.” I cover most of this in my article “Do vegans kill animals too?" but I felt that it warranted its own article since it seems to come up so frequently.
This article is in response to the claim that vegans are responsible for all the animal deaths and deforestation caused by soy. But as you’ll see from reading this, the vast majority of soy is grown for livestock feed, not for human use.
Let’s start by looking at what the American Soybean Association has to say:
“Animal agriculture is the soybean industry’s largest customer, and more than 90% of U.S. soybeans produced are used as a high-quality protein source for animal feed. About 70% of the soybean’s value comes from the meal, and 97% of U.S. soybean meal goes to feed livestock and poultry.”
Source: https://soygrowers.com/key-issues-initiatives/key-issues/other/animal-ag/
(Note: If you’re unfamiliar with them, the American Soybean Association (ASA) is an association of 21,000 American soybean producers. They are THE leading source of soybean producers in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Soybean_Association)
Note those key terms - 90% of soy is for animal feed and 70% of the value comes from it. So right here we’ve already established that animal feed is the number one customer of the soy industry in the US, and the part that produces animal feed (soy meal) is responsible for 70% of the value.
This should be pretty cut and dry, right? Soy is grown primarily for animal feed. Case closed?
So maybe the non-vegan will relent and agree that soy is mostly grown for livestock, but then they might say that the parts of the soybean we use for animal feed (soy meal) are byproducts and aren’t good for anything else, but that’s also not true. As the North Carolina Soybean Producers Association says:
“Because soy is rich in quality protein and digestible energy, most of the soymeal is turned into animal feed, by baking the protein-rich fiber that remains after the oil is removed. The remainder of soymeal is used to make some soyfoods like tofu and soy milk.”
Source: https://ncsoy.org/media-resources/uses-of-soybeans/
That’s right, animal feed is made using the same parts of soybeans that are used to make tofu and soy milk. Why is animal feed made first before human food? Simple supply and demand. Humans breed 90 billion animals into existence every year just to slaughter them for food, and most of them eat commercially grown animal feed. I know many people believe that animals raised for food graze and eat grass, but that’s mostly not true anymore. In the US 99% of animals are factory farmed, and worldwide that number is 94%. Factory-farmed animals don’t graze for their food; they eat commercially grown animal feed, which is why so much soy is being grown (to the point that it’s causing Amazon deforestation; more on that in the link below). We only have 8 billion humans on this planet, many of them don’t eat soy at all, and it’s certainly not the primary food of anyone’s diet. So the demand is much higher for animal feed than it is for soy-based human food.
Now, of course, that’s just the US, but what about global soy production? Is it also mostly grown for livestock feed? Let’s look at the data gathered by Oxford University, one of the most prestigious research institutions in the world:
“More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Most of the rest is used for biofuels, industry or vegetable oils. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh. The idea that foods often promoted as substitutes for meat and dairy – such as tofu and soy milk – are driving deforestation is a common misconception.”
(Note: the website “Our World in Data” is produced as a collaborative effort between researchers at the University of Oxford, who are the scientific contributors of the website content; and the non-profit organization Global Change Data Lab, who owns, publishes and maintains the website and the data tools: https://ourworldindata.org/organization)
Hopefully, this puts this to bed once and for all. Soy is grown primarily for livestock feed, not for human food. And the stuff we use to make animal feed (soy meal) is the same stuff used to make human food. So now we know that the vast majority of the animal deaths and deforestation coming from soy are due to the animal agriculture industry, not human food.
