Today’s agricultural feed cultivation for cattle, pigs and chicken comes with tremendous impacts for the environment and climate, including deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss and nitrogen pollution. Cultivating feed in industrial facilities instead of on croplands might help to alleviate the critical implications in the agricultural food supply chain. Protein-rich microbes, produced in large-scale industrial facilities, are likely to replace traditional crop-based feed. A new study now published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology now estimates the economic and environmental potential of feeding microbial protein to pigs, cattle and chicken on a global scale. The researchers find that by replacing only 2 percent of livestock feed with protein-rich microbes, more than 5 percent of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, global cropland area and global nitrogen losses could each be decreased.