The Human Impacts Database

A collection of useful numbers for quantifying the impacts of the human presence on Earth.


Land area requirement for egg production

LandAgriculture

This quantity is a single measurement of the quantity at a given point in time (2000 – 2010).

Value: 3 ± 1 m2 / yr / Mcal
HuID: 39661
Relevant Year(s): 2000 – 2010
Summary: Area of land needed to rear one megacalorie of eggs. This includes land area needed for rearing livestock as well as land area needed for production of animal feed. See Fig. 2 of source for more information
Method: Reported uncertainty is the standard deviation of the quantity given annually-averaged data over the years 2000 — 2010. The reported value was calculated using formal error propagation techniques given the reported uncertainties of the individual datasets. These uncertainties are in moderate agreement with those estimated using Monte Carlo based bootstrapping estimates.
Source: Eshel, G., Shepon, A., Makov, T., Milo, R. Land, irrigation water, greenhouse gas, and reactive nitrogen burdens of meat, eggs, and dairy production in the United States. PNAS (2014)
Dataset: Resource requirements per Mcal of livestock product and staple crops (eshel2014_fig2_data.csv)
global resolution
Original Data License: PNAS Open Access License
Added By: gchure