Cow milk is the real soy drink
More soy beans are used per litre of cow's milk than per litre of plant milk. Who's the soy drink now loser?
Cow's milk is made with on average over 3x as many soybeans per litre compared to plant milk in the US, and 11% more soybeans per litre in Europe.
Brazil is the top global producer of soybeans [1], with soybean production widely linked to deforestation of the Amazon rainforest [2]. But if we want to use fewer soybeans, switching to plant milk instead of dairy milk is the way to go.
Huge legal battles have meant that in many places it is now illegal to call plant milk "milk". But with these stats, maybe it should be a legal requirement to call cow milk "soy drink".
Data:
0.15kg of soybeans are required per litre of soy milk [3]
Soy milk made up 10% of plant milk sales by volume in the US[4], giving plant milk an average of 0.15 x 0.1 = 0.015 kg soybeans per litre of plant milk. In the EU, soy milk makes up 30% of plant milk sales by volume [5], giving plant milk an average of 0.15 * 0.3 = 0.045 kg soybeans per litre of plant milk.
In a year, from Sep 2021- Aug 2022, US dairy cattle consumed 4.93 million metric tonnes of soybean meal [6].
1210g of soybeans produce 1000g of soybean meal [7], meaning that US dairy cattle consumed 4.93 million x 1.12 x 1000 = 5520 million kg of soybeans during this period.
US Dairy cattle produced, during that time period, 225,826 million pounds of milk [8], which, with a density of 0.4808 litres per pound [9], is a total volume of 108,577 million litres.
This gives 5520 / 108577 = 0.05 kg soy beans per litre of cow milk.
In the US, there is 0.05 / 0.015 = 3.3 times as many soybeans per litre in cow milk vs plant milk, and in the EU there is 0.05 / 0.045 = 1.11 times as many soybeans per litre in cow milk vs plant milk, assuming that dairy cows in the EU are fed the same proportion of soy as US cows.
Sources:
[1]: https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#home
[2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837717306919
[4]: https://smartproteinproject.eu/plant-based-food-sector-report/
[5]: https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiNTU0MDIzZmMtYmMzYi00NmM3LTk3ODgtZjBiZGQzOTgxY2MwIiwidCI6ImQyNTQyNGQwLTY1MGUtNDZmYi1iZGYzLTQzNGQ1N2Y3YmE3ZCIsImMiOjN9
[6]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1065/lca2007.06.342
[7]: https://www.beveragemarketing.com/shop/assets/PDFs/PlantMilksUS2024.pdf
[8]: https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/h989r321c/3197zw874/st74f049d/mkpr1022.pdf