Opinion: Meat production a huge user of water
By James McWilliams, New York Times
California is experiencing one of its worst droughts on record. Just two and a half years ago, Folsom Lake, a major reservoir outside Sacramento, was at 83 percent capacity. Today it’s down to 36 percent. In January, there was no measurable rain in downtown Los Angeles. Gov. Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency. President Obama has pledged $183 million in emergency funding. The situation, despite last week’s deluge in Southern California, is dire.
With California producing nearly half of the fruit and vegetables grown in the United States, attention has naturally focused on the water required to grow popular foods such as walnuts, broccoli, lettuce, tomatoes, strawberries, almonds and grapes. These crops are the ones that a recent report in the magazine Mother Jones highlighted as being unexpectedly water intensive. Who knew, for example, that it took 5.4 gallons to produce a head of broccoli, or 3.3 gallons to grow a single tomato? This information about the water footprint of food products — that is, the amount of water required to produce them — is important to understand, especially for a state that dedicates about 80 percent of its water to agriculture.
But for those truly interested in lowering their water footprint, those numbers pale next to the water required to fatten livestock. A 2012 study in the journal Ecosystems by Mesfin M. Mekonnen and Arjen Y. Hoekstra, both at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, tells an important story. Beef turns out to have an overall water footprint of roughly 4 million gallons per ton produced. By contrast, the water footprint for “sugar crops” like sugar beets is about 52,000 gallons per ton; for vegetables it’s 85,000 gallons per ton; and for starchy roots it’s about 102,200 gallons per ton.
Having at least one if not several vegetarian days each week is good for your health, conserves water and has the potential to lessen the toll livestock grazing has on public lands. With beef so cheap at fast food and other eateries, we are quietly seduced into eating more and more of it but you really have to ask if the cheap cost of a burger accurately reflects the environmental costs of producing it and the health costs of eating it.
4 Million gallons of fresh water per ton of beef is not going to fly as long as the drought continues in the West. When the drought hit the dust bowl in the 1930’s, the ranchers had to sell off or kill most of their herds.
Forget the water. Remember that the cows/pigs/chickens need to eat something. I right off forget the number but something like 8 pounds of grain to make 1 pound of meat. Correct me please. It is staggering. 8 lbs of gain will feed 1 person a lot longer than 1 pound of meat. Beef is not just free ranged fed. It is eventually taken to the feed lot to fatten it up for your table. In the end your groceries will be more expensive, food for the poor will be less available and everyone will still be happily flushing their toilets watching the yellows and browns go down the drain.