[photojosh]

Solar power for 1,000 homes would require 32 acres of land. [1]

Food for 1,000 homes requires 7800 acres. [2,3]

That's ~240x as much for food as compared to energy. It's a rounding error in terms of "damage to Mother Nature" and could be easily compensated for by not wasting so much of our produced food.

This came to mind because filling an entire roof with solar panels would definitely meet all the power requirements of a house (except for probably electric vehicles), but I was relatively confident that it took a whole lot more area to farm food for that household.

My math could have a mistake somewhere, did this pretty quickly. Feel free to tear it apart. :)

[1] https://www.energymanagertoday.com/it-takes-2-8-acres-of-lan...

[2] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.AGRI.K2?locations... -> 4,082,000 sq km / 321 million = 3.1 acres per person.

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183648/average-size-of-h... -> 2.5 people per household, x 3.1 acres per person = 7.8 acres per house = 7800 acres per thousand homes.

[nostrademons]

Math seems about right to me. Photosynthesis is only 3% efficient, vs. about 30% for current-generation solar panels, so that's already 320 acres. Current agricultural crops put about 40-50% of their incoming solar energy towards the edible parts, so that's 640 (you can thank the green revolution for that - wild plants put only about 5% of their incoming energy towards fruit/seed production, but we've selectively bred them for a 10x improvement in productivity). You lose a factor of about 10 going up a trophic level to eat meat, so if half your diet is meat, that'd be 3200 + 320 = 3520 acres to support your diet. Figure on transportation losses and food waste for the additional factor of 2.

All numbers are from a sustainable agriculture course I took in college, with a few spot checks by Googling.

This, BTW, should drive home just how environmentally-damaging carnivorism is and how switching to a vegetarian diet is actually significantly more impactful than almost any household energy conservation you do. However, as a long-time meat eater, I don't care, and just accept that I'm a terrible person.

[photojosh]

Cool, thanks for the extra info.

I justify my meat consumption because in Australia most of our beef cattle are grazed on land that's useless for anything else. But I do agree that we should reduce meat consumption. Even if just for health we're eating twice as much as we should, let alone the environment.

[grwthckrmstr]

Red meat