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Meat Makes Our Planet Thirsty
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Mames McWilliams writes in the NYT that with California experiencing one of its worst droughts on record, attention has naturally focused on the water required to grow popular foods such as walnuts, broccoli, lettuce, tomatoes, strawberries, almonds and grapes. '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. Beef turns out to have an overall water footprint of roughly four million gallons per ton produced (PDF). 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.
There's also one single plant that's leading California's water consumption and it's one that's not generally cultivated for humans: alfalfa. Grown on over a million acres in California, alfalfa sucks up more water than any other crop in the state. And it has one primary destination: cattle. 'If Californians were eating all the beef they produced, one might write off alfalfa's water footprint as the cost of nurturing local food systems. But that's not what's happening. Californians are sending their alfalfa, and thus their water, to Asia.' Alfalfa growers are now exporting some 100 billion gallons of water a year from this drought-ridden region to the other side of the world in the form of alfalfa.
Beef eaters are already paying more. Water-starved ranches are devoid of natural grasses that cattle need to fatten up so ranchers have been buying supplemental feed at escalating prices or thinning their herds to stretch their feed dollars. But McWilliams says that in the case of agriculture and drought, there's a clear and accessible actions most citizens can take: Changing one's diet to replace 50 percent of animal products with edible plants like legumes, nuts and tubers results in a 30 percent reduction in an individual's food-related water footprint. Going vegetarian reduces that water footprint by almost 60 percent. 'It's seductive to think that we can continue along our carnivorous route, even in this era of climate instability. The environmental impact of cattle in California, however, reminds us how mistaken this idea is coming to seem.'"
There's also one single plant that's leading California's water consumption and it's one that's not generally cultivated for humans: alfalfa. Grown on over a million acres in California, alfalfa sucks up more water than any other crop in the state. And it has one primary destination: cattle. 'If Californians were eating all the beef they produced, one might write off alfalfa's water footprint as the cost of nurturing local food systems. But that's not what's happening. Californians are sending their alfalfa, and thus their water, to Asia.' Alfalfa growers are now exporting some 100 billion gallons of water a year from this drought-ridden region to the other side of the world in the form of alfalfa.
Beef eaters are already paying more. Water-starved ranches are devoid of natural grasses that cattle need to fatten up so ranchers have been buying supplemental feed at escalating prices or thinning their herds to stretch their feed dollars. But McWilliams says that in the case of agriculture and drought, there's a clear and accessible actions most citizens can take: Changing one's diet to replace 50 percent of animal products with edible plants like legumes, nuts and tubers results in a 30 percent reduction in an individual's food-related water footprint. Going vegetarian reduces that water footprint by almost 60 percent. 'It's seductive to think that we can continue along our carnivorous route, even in this era of climate instability. The environmental impact of cattle in California, however, reminds us how mistaken this idea is coming to seem.'"
In the water-deprived future, a fat ribeye will still be more expensive than a glass of dihydrogen monoxide.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Yet more shill from the vegetarian/vegan department.
We just had a much needed rain. To protect fish from swimming up the delta they dumped thousands of acre feet of water into the bay. I'm all for restoring wetlands but we should prioritize water for humans during droughts. The poor are the hardest hit.
Or California could stop diverting water to protect the Delta Smelt.
[Insert pithy quote here]
'nuff said.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
If you're truly an environmentalist.
But what if, in prioritizing water for humans now, you cause more issues latter by destroying even more of the food chain's habitat?
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Alfalfa is used to feed dairy cattle that produce ... dairy ... used to make cheese, yogurt and other products. Alfalfa is not fed to beef cattle.
It's a frequent "let's play absurd" argument from meat eaters that plants have a central nervous system, too, and suffer and that they are being nice to plants by not eating meat.
But processing plants into meat before consumption requires easily six times as much vegetable matter than if you eat it right away. Now one can't put this to an immediate comparison since obviously the human digestive system can make almost no use at all from eating grass, so one needs to pick grass variants (like rice or maize) that process significant amounts of their energy into more humanly digestible sugars than cellulose.
But the short and the long story is: eating meat is an inefficient use of resources, and that's even the case when the particular meat animals (like cattle) are quite better at digesting plant matter than humans are.
Going vegetarian will have one principle affect; corporations will export more meat than they do now. Meat production is where their capital is invested, so that's what they're going to make their money on. Stop eating meat today and tomorrow your meat will be on its way to China and Korea. An awful lot of vegetarians have o concept of what it costs to set up a farming operation, and how inflexible those resources are.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Doesn't the price difference of this variety of food address this issue? Beef requires more resources to produce => Beef costs more in the supermarket.
That's all very interesting, except that all animals only borrow water - they give it back in the form of water vapor when they breathe, sweat (for some) and pee.
In the case of livestock production, the pee is usually used as fertilizer for the surrounding fields, as it holds nutrients that plants need. So there's a bit of efficiency to it.
Oh, and let's not forget how many small animals are run through farm machinery in the support of the vegan diet.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Without the fish, your rivers will die.
Why would you want to sacrifice your own healthy river for cattle feed in China?
Even more interesting is the total waste that humans use. We should stop producing them and start killing them off.
Does anyone need some water?
Land Mammals
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Thing is we are not talking about subsistence prioritization, we are talking about water's usage in what is essentially a luxury industry, an industry that is driving up the cost of everything else in the process. In this case, if we are going to 'prioritize humans' then that is it, humans will consume as much as they can and leave nothing, so there is no point where humans are 'done' and resources can be diverted for preservation.
As for the poor being hardest hit, that is not the fault of the drought, that is the fault of the middle class. Cheap beef raises water consumption and prices of everything else.
Most farmers who grow alfalfa are those who got water at throw away prices back in 1920s/1930s when the Hoover dam was being built, when they pumped the Colorado river over the Sierra Neveda to irrigate the water starved central valley. Then through political action, through law suits and by claiming these as their "right" they have been taking water and much below market prices and wasting it all in stupid crops like alfalfa. If they paid market rates, we could just shrug and leave it to free markets. But after taking in all that water pumped by the government, at far below cost, at far below market rates, they turn around and claim to be "freedom lovers", "get the government out of my hair", "government never creates value" "taxation is theft" libertarians.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Does the high water usage matter?
What about simply pricing water what it is worth? Currently, many resources (such as water) are priced negligibly, most of which includes the costs of delivering water. If water is so valuable in a certain region, price it quite high. If alfalfa becomes too expensive to grow and export, people will stop doing it. If meat becomes too expensive, people will alter their diets. Long-winded appeals to emotion are unlikely to engender much behavioral change at the moment.
don't grow cattle in california.
Are you talking about California? Drought doesn't hit poor people any harder than rich in California. Other areas, especially where subsistence farming is practiced, yes.
There are health benefits derived from moving to a diet rich in unrefined plants.
Granted, some of this is not just avoiding meat, but many of the refined and processed carbohydrate items that have found a symbiotic niche between our cravings and profitable marketing, production and legislative marketplaces (cheez doodle agricultural economy).
now exporting some 100 billion gallons of water a year
Can someone explain to me how this sentence even makes sense? It seems to imply that the sate is somehow losing water forever by shipping it abroad. But when the water is consumed, whether in China or California, it will eventually make its way back out into the Pacific Ocean, which is the ultimate source for all of California's water. So once the water is used to grow a crop, for the purpose of California's future wetness, it doesn't really matter one iota where the crop ultimately gets consumed.
The path to prosperity was not conservation like in the Jimmy Carter era. We need to build up infrastructure and utilize water more effectively. Apply technology to create plentiful energy and water resources.
artificial market controls keep the price of meat low, so we consume excess amounts.
as the price rises, consumption will go down and the problem solves itself. meat will turn from main course to side dish real fast.
i never understood the fixation with 100% meat. meatloaf > pure beef. people were hyperventilating online when taco bell announced their "meat" was 40% meat.
I don't get the problem. Do these guys really believe that whatever water you put into creating food is completely gone and will never appear again on this planet?
significantly eyes on the real interest 1n having share. *BSD is The bottoms butt is ingesting achievements that AVAILABLE TO Effort to address
Why aren't they measuring per metabolizable calorie instead of ton? Meat is more energy dense than a head of lettuce.
Also, water consumed by plants and creatures isn't lost forever. Sure, the bonds are cracked to make hydrocarbons, but the H and the O still exists. It's not like our bodies perform nuclear reactions.
I have a very difficult time believing this. This sounds like junk, alarmist science. The problems are more than just meat. We cannot even begin to understand what impact human beings have on the environment. We can really only speculate and postulate. We do not really understand the weather, which is only a part of the climate system. Anyone that claims to be an expert on climate, I raise an eyebrow. This does not mean that we should not be better stewards of our home. Conservation is wise and prudent.
It's not the food chain or fish in general. Nor is it a necessity. It's to help the delta smelt, which isn't as important as decreasing the cost of vegetables for the poor. This does not save or hurt wetlands it's arbitrary.
The poor are the hardest hit.
The poor are ALWAYS hardest hit. The definition of "poor" in general context is "those lacking resources." No matter what harmful event happens on Earth, the "have-not's" are going to be most adversely impacted; the "have's" would have left, bought supplies, lived in brick & mortar instead of a modular home. lived on higher ground, etc.
So you are saying the smelt neither have a natural predator, or are the predator for any other items in its habitat? You seem to be making the assumption that preserving one animal has no other positive impacts, as though removing one species could not collapse a habitat. http://press.princeton.edu/cha...
When you cant win, ad hominem.
My family doesn't buy beef because the half dozen or so deer we kill per year more than meets our needs.
I'm sure the overuse of water has more to do with people insisting on living in areas where there isn't enough water to sustain the population or land use than growing crops explicitly for feed.
Farms do not shut down voluntarily. If they aren't using the water to grow alfalfa then they would just use it to grow a different cash crop.
I think the report is a creative way to further the vegan agenda.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
... than go vegan.
After all, you would have admit you've been doing something wrong all your life. Not just wrong, but atrocious. You would have to tell your 'friends' (LOL) that you actually care about animals and that would mean you aren't really a man any more (LOL), you might actually have to start caring about others, and you've been pretending to that all your life, and you know you can't actually feel the suffering of others. (Otherwise you'd have gone vegan years ago).
Look at the laughable responses here, knee jerk reactions from little children pretending to be adults - "Oh, what will I do without meat! Let's poo poo the science and do anything to bait and switch, just avoid the question altogether."
The suffering caused by such arrogance and selfishness is beyond comprehension - especially for the selfish fools who actually CAUSE it all, by refusing to even THINK for five minutes about the consequences of their actions.
I will live on vegetables when they can make a turnip or some other vegetable taste like a nice juicy medium rare rib-eye steak.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
(I've got karma, and I know how to burn it. So here goes some.)
The same idiots that trot out this junk science and "suggest" that we all go vegan, are the same damn fools that would have us all "save the environment" by putting corn into our gas tanks; and turn California's most fertile farming area turn into a desert in order to "save" some freaking minnows that actually need MORE water, not less.
The thing that really needs to be studied is what the hell happens to areas where the so-called "intelligencia" are allowed to run amok with their foolish ideas.
Near where I live, we have just such a place. It's called Detroit.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
The sense of smugness and superiority.
If California wants to solve its water issues. Stop Busting Dams.
Build more. Kill off that @#$! fish and be done with it.
So in that state water costs less for the poor than the rich? The point is that while it may cost the same, it hurts one group more because it costs more of their money as a percentage of their money.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
In case no one has noticed, California is a desert (or nearly one) for most of its area. Before the farm subsidy act of the 1950's, no one grew food crops in California, and no one raised cattle. Then, after subsidies were based on your distance from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where they get 30-40" of rain a year, suddenly California became *the* address for raising food. When you can raise dairy cattle at a loss, milk them at a loss, and produce a gallon of milk for $6, and still sell it for $2 wholesale -- and the government ensures you're making a profit by handing you a $5 a gallon subsidy, of course you're going to raise cattle and farm in California.
California has to drain the Colorado river, and the showsheds of something like 1,000,000 hectares of mountains to even get close to their water needs on a good year. In the meantime, farms in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, and the rest of the heartland are all collapsing into bankruptcy, unable to compete with the ever-increasing subsidies bought by the legislatures of California with its 50+ congressmen and electoral votes.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
Not more dense than sugar beets though, which take less than 1% of the water per ton.
As Garrett Hardin (look him up) would say, there is no shortage of water, there is a *longage* of demand. We can reduce the population, or reduce the relevant population, by not exporting beef. Course, that would start a trade war, and those farmers would get pissed..hey! piss! Water!
There have always been, and always will be water wars..
Not because it's an inherently scarce commodity, but because the distribution is uneven, and randomly varies.
So the folks who plant the pistachio orchards are betting on having enough water sometime in the future to be able to sell 90% of the world's pistachios. It's not like we're subsistence farmers: this is a luxury good to a certain extent, and the Resnicks (who also bring you POMwonderful and Fiji water) are "betting the farm" on this.
Everyone talks about how insignificant the delta smelt is.. but it's not just the smelt: that's a convenient indicator; it's also the salmon, and the other things in the delta.
On the other hand, the "preserve the delta" folks are just as bad as the "make the deserts of the San Joaquin bloom" folks. Those delta farms are just as artificial, just 100 years older. Back in the day, there used to be huge floods that would cover much of the valley floor with water. This was aggravated by hydraulic and other mining in the 1850s which put enormous amounts of sediment into what's now the delta. To this day there are huge hills of mine tailings all over the central valley, north of Sacramento, in particular.
There's a reason Stockton used be called Tuleville: it was basically a swamp filled with tules.
They also cut down most of the trees in the valley to provide fuel for steamboats going up the river.
So lets just accept that things in the central valley, and in California in general, are "not natural" and haven't been "natural" for 150 years. Let's recognize that farming is inherently a "subject to nature's whims" business, and, yep, sometimes you're not going to get a crop because it didn't rain/snow enough. Sure enough, you'll need to fallow some land in some years: this has been the case for millenia, and now that a tiny, tiny part of the nation's workforce is occupied in agriculture, it doesn't even need to be particularly disruptive in a economic sense. We're not in early 20th century society, where a drought or flood causes mass migration, a'la the Joads of Steinbeck, or even the Great Northward Migration of African Americans.
Like most things Reagan, that works right up to the point where you actually have to implement it. Increasing water resources means increasing energy usage. Which is great when you have plentiful energy, except that we don't. Energy costs money, and clean energy (the kind that doesn't pollute the "free" clean water sources we have) costs even more money and takes even more energy to get moving.
Not using a resource always costs less than converting a non-usable resource into a usable one.
Ronald Reagan was a nice old man, a great people person, and a charismatic leader. And that counts for a lot when you're dealing with people and leaders. But he was dumber than a brick when it came to economics and technology.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Blaming meat eaters for poor agricultural practices is wrong.
First off, cattle should NOT be eating diets wholly of corn and alfalfa. Cattle are grazers and should by and large be eating grasses and the like. The issue is that we are trying to raise cattle in a concentrated habitat rather than naturally.
Likewise, look at the midwest and all the corn and soy fields. The immense amount of water drained from prehistoric aquifers is unsustainable. Yet, millions of head of bison roamed the midwest. They fed on the prairie grasses, deep rooted grasses that survived the periodic droughts and protected the soil from those droughts. The bison ate the grasses, pooped, fertilized, and created further soil.
In fact, permaculturalists have used this method with combinations of cattle and chickens. In those systems the rate of soil growth can be immense, one older system had to replace their fence because so much new fertile soil was made by the intense but balanced grazing of animals.
It is one thing to say that if we went vegetarian that would provide more food. But it's another to discount how much water we pump out to grow those plants suitable for vegetarians. Versus the ranging of cattle on natural grasses that persist on the mere natural rainfall.
Consider how sustainable meat would be if cattle ranged suburbia, grazing on all the grass of suburbian yards. Suddenly, that cow uses very little additional water....WHEN ITS EATING GRASS!!!
Please note, my yard is green with grass, perhaps not gourmey fancy yard grass, but I NEVER water my lawn. Just mow it periodically. Grass doesn't need watering most of the time as long as it is a grass suitable for your region's natural balance.
Population is growing too fast millions will starve. The world is getting colder we'll all freeze. We will use up all the oil and civilization will crash. Drug resistant germs will wipe us out. Global warming will melt the ice caps and flood the coasts. This is all crap. The world is more prosperous and healthy and clean today than 100 years ago. These doom and gloom predictions are a result of linear status quo thinking. We live in a nonlinear world full of innovation. When a problem presents itself and begins to have economic and social impact we find a solution and fix the problem. The energy problem will eventually be solved by solar and renewables (Cyanobacteria). The water problem will be solved through desalination perhaps using graphene membranes. Life will be extended and diseases will be conquered. We will move out into space. Our children will live longer in a better world than we have. They will face challenges however they are so interconnected so smart with the knowledge of the world at their fingertips they will survive and prosper.
Do you drink piss?
No, because the water you've "used" is in no fit condition for you to consume. And after you've pissed it away, it's no longer (you hope!) in you incoming supply of water.
If you think all the water you drink came from today's rainfall you're wrong. You could be drinking water from rainfall thousands of years ago... if rainfall has decreased in you area over geological time, you could be taking your water from a source that is not re-filling at an equal rate... i.e. you're using the resources and they're not being replaced...
FFS, given all the other cluelessness in other posts, I give up. You either get it or you don't. Hope you don't get thirsty!
I noticed sugar beets used very little water comparatively. That may explain why they taste like dirt.
This is part of a campaign trying to whitewash industrial consumption of water. Most water used in agriculture/cattle feed is not consumed in any sense of the word. It evaporates back into the atmosphere. In contrast industrial processes often break down the molecules and whatever H2O is left is usually highly polluted and thus truly consumed.
For example at the Autostadt museum they were claiming that a banana "consumes" 100L of water, while neglecting to mention that all of this water is rain that would have fallen down regardless in the first place and that most of it evaporates right back into the tropical growing lands where bananas are grown.
Alfalfa is also rotated with corn to replenish the nitrogen in the soil. I believe that if you just grow corn on the same plot year after year without crop rotation, the soil becomes "tired" and your corn quality suffers. I suppose that alfalfa is mostly going to cattle, and we could rotate the corn with soybeans instead, but there's more to growing alfalfa than just feeding cows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://hayandforage.com/mag/ro...
Koans and fables for the software engineer
How is this a Slashdot topic?
Last time I checked, dietary considerations and irrigation policy weren't high on the agenda of a site that usually talks about electronics, rockets, and Star Trak...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Abso-freeking-lutly !
Just like the cows. They drink thousands of gallons of water, but that water is not in the meat or the cow.
They piss it out, and that water goes where? Into the ground or the air to be recycled as rain.
Just more eco-propaganda.
We just pour water into cattle and nothing wet ever comes out. Instead, all the water is converted directly into meat.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Meat Makes Our Planet Thirsty
And apparently makes us write long summaries.
So if you could maybe considering modding the parent down. This answer is not correct because it isn't trendy. And it's probably racist, too. So, in conclusion, mod parent down!
Not more dense than sugar beets though, which take less than 1% of the water per ton.
Most of the density in sugar beets is water, which doesn't have caloric value.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I am trying to eat a vegitarian diet myself.
But even if beef takes twice the water, doesn't it also have way more nutrition?
Places like California subsidize water for farming uses, hence why the shortages.
Make the farmers and the people watering their lawns all pay the same price, and let the price fluctuate with the market, and you'll be shocked how quickly the "shortages" come to an end.
Will this mean little old ladies and single mom's might see their water bill maybe? It certainly means the farmers will have to start coming out of pocket or quickly adopt better methods of irrigation. Then is that actually worse than turning the tap and have nothing come out?
It might also help that the douche bags on the west coast quit shutting down every effort to install RO plants as well.
Water bills typically don't go up a lot in droughts. That may change, but the way they've been managed in California in the past, they don't raise the rates because of a shortage.
If it takes 4M gallons of water to produce one ton of beef, I'd think my water savings by swapping out half my meat product consumption with vegetables would save a LOT more than 30% of my water footprint, if the figures for water consumption by vegetables are also accurate.
I think their numbers for vegetables are good, but the numbers for cattle are WAY overblown. According to helpful calculations provided by the USGS, "You would need to build a pool about 267 feet long (almost as long as a football field), 50 feet wide, and 10 feet deep" to hold 1M gallons. The idea that it takes four of those (weighing a total of 16,000 tons) to produce a single ton of beef is beyond belief. I know forage crops are not always the most water-efficient, and cattle feed isn't the most efficient use of crops, but it's not THAT bad.
Wow, nice try to mask the "be a vegetarian" propaganda (starting with the "gee meat is pretty expensive..." and then down to the soft sell "50%" reduction before you really get to the "but it's really best to not eat meat at all". I see what you did there, doing some multiplying and coming up with huge numbers to sound shocking but at the same time being completely reductive to the complexities - as stated, a lb of beef is worth a lot more to the economy than a lb of watercress.
Truth is, drought is an expected symptom of humans tapping the resources of a place that is inhospitable to the way which we demand to live. Southern California lawns were not meant to look like lush New England summers year-round. It's also cheaper in many ways to raise cattle there, which is why folks do it there as opposed to other places (though there is great cattle outside of CA, this piece only focuses on CA). They could go places with cheaper or free and plentiful water but pay more for everything else.
We've sure got plenty of water here on the other coast. Hell many of us have pumps in our basements pushing it out as fast as we can pump it during some seasons, pumping it out into the back yard for free if anyone wanted to take it. But I can't complain - if it bothered me that much, I could just move to CA.
Well some quick googling shows that beats have about .5 calories per gram and steak has about 3 calories per gram, so it's still a pretty drastic difference.
No mention of RICE anywhere here? It's a huge crop in CA, believe it or not. Don't take my word for it:
From CalRice
Maybe alfalfa does require more water than rice, but not to mention it makes this sound more anti-meat than sensible advocacy.
"Changing one's diet to replace 50 percent of animal products with edible plants like legumes, nuts and tubers results in a 30 percent reduction in an individual's food-related water footprint"
So 300 million people should all change what they do on a daily basis instead of 1 government agency passing a law saying we can't export alfalfa, among others that would fix the drought situation. Great logic!
Water is one of those resources which flow and circulate. They don't get "used up" so much. It is used in its many forms, liquid, gas and solid and its transitions from one state to the other is often useful. It is temporarily held within bodies of produce and other products and in people as well. But these are molecules which circulate all over. The water molecules which are in your body right now may have previously been in a T.Rex long ago at some point.
Now, some states and conditions and situations of water aren't "usable" at the moment and it would take some time before it gets to that state. Which leads to the main issue of water conservation. That main issue is how much is available at any one time in the appropriate state and condition at the right time and in the right place. Under circumstances when resources are presently insufficient, the next question is cost and time to achieve the desired resource levels.
I guess what I'm getting at is the understanding of not "how much is used" but "the rate of how much is available minus the rate of how much is used." When you get negative numbers, it's a problem... obviously. But for people to just say "how much is used" denies people a bigger understanding.
F&&k off
You will never not stop me from maximizing my profits off your LOSS and suffering, not matter how bad it gets for YOU!!
This is a free country and you can't stop me!
Government is there to keep me from being ME, I spend a lot of my money to keep that from happening!!!
So take a hike you tree hugging, environment loving, hippie!!!
I'm here to get rich while the getting is good!! Then I'm taking my profits, my family if any still like me or my money, and moving somewhere else all legal like. Its the American Way so BACKOFF NOW!!!!
Signed your current, future, and past overlords!!!
So the folks who plant the pistachio orchards are betting on having enough water sometime in the future to be able to sell 90% of the world's pistachios. It's not like we're subsistence farmers: this is a luxury good to a certain extent, and the Resnicks (who also bring you POMwonderful and Fiji water) are "betting the farm" on this.
I don't drink it often, because its expensive and it seems insane to ship water so far, but damn that Fiji water is about the best-tasting water I've ever had.
The numbers for alphalpha and water exported didn't make a lot of sense, so I did a couple of quick searches: http://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcor...
That is right, they are counting as "exported" water which....the vast majority of.... evaporates locally, and stays in the local environment.
That is straight up lies.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Water? Dead minnows and frogs and econ-nuts? Build nuclear power plants to desalinate drinking water ... use runnoff for human bling like meat that makes humans smart. Squeeze guts & blood from faggy vegetarians for pig-food. Fyuck bytch Gaia in the *zzwhole with a plastic irrigation pipe.
You really need to decide
who is on the winning side
and give the losers a ride
to the gutter --- mutter --
What a stupid title
The water is not destroyed in the process and is merely recycled naturally. Where exactly do they think it "goes"? A magical black hole never to return? Whether or goes through a cow or is metabolized by a plant as it grows it still ends up right back where it came from. Stupid environmentalist and the m0r0ns who fall for this cr4p.
So, how long ago was "The Big Thirst" published. All this is saying is that Ag is yet another cog in the Virtual Water Economy.
100 bn gals of water = @ 417,000 tons
Anything wrong with the math??
Last time i checked, water is a renewable resource.
Fresh water is a problem, but just focus on desalinization and bringing in fresh water from the oceans.
You literally can't run out.
So, alfalfa is the most thirsty, which means over 102,000 gallons per ton. We are sending Asia our water, so that implies that even if alfalfa weighed nothing, and we were sending exactly 102,000.00001 gallons per ton, we have managed to fit 380 tons in a ton.
I think we should be CELEBRATING that meat has brought us real compression of actual matter!
What is the "Water Footprint" of the average Human? All that eating of the beef and even vegetables, washing clothes, cars and bodies. Maybe we should try banning Humans, they seem to be the biggest water wasters out there.
They're operating under the well established scientific fact that when water hits the ground, it's gone. It just simply ceases to exist. If you think maybe it's used to carry minerals up a plant's stem and into the leaves where it's aspirated out into the air and becomes water vapor that falls back down onto the ground when it rains elsewhere, you're just talking fantasy and science fiction. Clearly the water is just GONE!
Water is not consumed. There is no such thing as a water shortage. It is impossible to run out of water.
The fact we don't have solar-powered desalination plants all over the coasts (and out to sea) at this point is simple laziness and ineptitude.
Just because raising cattle in CA doesn't make sense, it doesn't mean it doesn't make sense to raise cattle anywhere else.
I LOL when I hear my kids get lectured about the need for water conservation in books that act like California and the midwest are equivalent biomes.
A key factor in human survival is our ability to eat virtually anything. Cricket flour tastes surprisingly good and can be made into a variety of products which do not in any way resemble the original source:
http://chapul.com/
Crickets have almost the protein content of beef and use less than half the feed. Best of all, they consume almost no water.
This message is brought to you by the Vegetarian Association of America in conjunction with PeTA.
Half-truths and misinformation. Nothing to see here folks, move on.
it's what all those red and green squiggles are.
perhaps that's because you didn't have a proper feel for exactly how much water a plant needs. I'm guessing by the way you reacted and then ran the numbers that you work in some kind of agriculture... no? oh, you are likely not in any accustomed to estimating water use. think about how many times you water a tomato plant over the course of a growing season. of course that number adds up.
Been seeing a lot of anti-meat propaganda recently, I wonder why.
Have gnu, will travel.
And your utilities water bills are the only thing that charge you for the cost of water? Bottled water pries never go up?
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Missing from the vegetarian fear fest is that meat has ten times the caloric value of vegetables. For example, the 100 calories achieved with 1.2 ounces of porterhouse steak requires eating more than 12 ounces of Broccoli. . That ten-fold higher mass also has an even higher bulk, since vegetables are much less dense than meat. That means ten times the cost, at least, to ship the same caloric content as vegetables compared to meat.
Of course we need vegetables too, for vitamins and minerals, as part of a balanced diet. But meat has high value as a compact source of calories required for daily life. As far as water usage goes, the California drought is temporary. There is no scientific evidence that the intensity or frequency of drought in the western U.S. is increasing (). All that is required is managing agricultural cycles to accommodate dry periods. When you interfere with that management, for instance by blocking water supplies to agriculture to protect delta smelt, then drought can get the upper hand. That's what's happening today in California.
It seems to me that almost all of this concern over running short of water centers around having enough available clean drinking water; a very different issue than actually not having water at all.
California is a *coastal* state, up against an ocean full of water, yet they're seriously entertaining such elaborate ideas as pumping water from an aquifer far below the desert, to areas around L.A. (Never mind the strong possibility that once they drain it, it won't refill for quite a long time again.)
People keep discussing desalination as too costly and inefficient a process... as something that's "not Green enough". IMO, that's ridiculous. The clear answer is to do more R&D to make that process more feasible! When you're short on drinkable water but you sit up against an ocean full of it, and removing the salt is the only real obstacle? Figure out a good way to remove the salt!
Has anyone controlled the Water / Kilo or Pound by the Number of Kilos/Pounds consumed? E.g, butter is clearly the most expensive, but how many Kilos are consumed per year on average? Presumably fewer of butter. Also, there are by products to butter, such as low fat milk or milk powder. Another controlling factor is effluent. Slaughterhouses are presumably much more damaging or potentially damaging to water supplies than almonds.
(apologies for anonymity, I'll get a login )
That's utterly beside the point. We're concerned with the amount of water needed to produce food -- or produce a calorie in this particular thread -- not the amount of water in the end product. We're not talking about whether we should be juicing beef or beets in order to drink the water.
Average age of slaughter for cattle is 18 to 24 months depending on who you ask (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_best_age_for_beef_slaughter?#slide=2), and the average consumption of water for dry cattle is 38 L/day (http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/engineer/facts/07-023.htm#2). Take the maximum of 24 months you get: 38 L x 365 days in a year x 2 = 27,740 litres. Which is approx. 7,328 gallons. 1 ton is approx. 2,000 pounds...average weight for cattle at slaughter is around 1,400 pounds (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_slaughter_weight_for_a_cow?#slide=6), so that would be 7,328 gallons x 2 = 14,626 gallons of water.
The article says it takes 145,000 gallons of water. I'd like to see the author's source material.
But either way, it's nice to see that the author is not pushing his vegan agenda (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_E._McWilliams).
from what I've read, the goal of dumping this water was to keep any smelt from getting caught in the pumps that would have taken the water to the farming area. The same article/blogpost (I don't remember which) asserted that the loss of smelt in pumps was lower than the loss to federal monitoring practices, which at least _sounds_ like the population could probably stand a _little_ more peril.
The author is referring to Virtual Water . It's an interesting concept, but the Wikipedia entry notes
There are, however, significant deficiencies with the concept of virtual water that mean there is a significant risk in relying on these measures to guide policy conclusions. Accordingly, Australia's National Water Commission considers that the measurement of virtual water has little practical value in decision making regarding the best allocation of scarce water resources.
Couples just need to limit themselves to 2 children. That's it. The population would slowly decrease until underpopulation was the major concern. But given the global population of over 7bn, it would take some time.
There's also the problem of who it is that's having children. The people going above and beyond 2 are people that are less likely to have the resources necessary to care for all of them.
Alright...who let the fucking vegetarians out for their cage and gave them fucking internet access?
They are almost as bad as the Angry Atheists.
Time to fire up some desalination plants sitting right off that big bath tub of an ocean on your shore, no? What are you gonna use to power it? Certainly not nuclear, because that's scary. My guess, you'll opt for coal and then bitch about the CO2.
We need to modify the gene of these animals to drink salt water. We have lots of it. If you run out of salt water, I can sell you some for cheap.
In my city, most of the drinking water comes from Lake Michigan, where fish piss and defecate in all the time. We still drink it. Why? Because it goes through treatment & filtration. It's perfectly safe. There's nothing tainted about the water in piss. It's still dihydrogen monoxide. It's all the other stuff that's in solution that you've an issue with. Filter that out, and you've got perfectly fine water.
Pretty much any municipal water supply is going to through some sort of treatment. In the US, chlorination is a popular solution.
FFS, given all the other cluelessness in other posts, I give up. You either get it or you don't. Hope you don't get thirsty!
Good, because obviously you don't get it. Just because waste water isn't immediately potable, doesn't make it lost.
Most of California is a desert. You can irrigate it all you want, but it's still a desert. California is working hard to replace places where these things were traditionally grown.
More B.S. California's problem with water shortages is mostly due to Man Made Regulations! Read about how they are restricting water flow to 'protect' some little minnow. http://online.wsj.com/news/art... and http://westernfarmpress.com/bl...
But what about this... do you realize that in order to grow one single cow, an ENTIRE PLANET had to come into creation, first? Do you know how much energy that required????
The amount of water needed to produce Ethanol should then be more than enough reason to ban Ethanol. Once we stop using food (corn) as fuel we can go back to proper agriculture where crops are rotated instead of farms increasing not growing other crops so they can cash in on the corn bonanza. The problems in California have nothing to do with rainfall and everything to do with Government Regulations from the EPA. http://westernfarmpress.com/bl...
In typical fashion though the Government regulates a problem into existence, hires "Researches" to say the new problem caused by Government Regulations is actually caused by something else that the Government is not yet regulating (but would like to regulate) and thus creating a public outcry for the Government to regulate another part of our lives and cause yet more problems. All why you sheeple are thankful the kind and caring Government is saving you from an evil made up boogyman.
I don't believe we are on a sustainable path with the population we have. I like my meat. The US should exploit it's breadbaskets. We should also leave something behind to exploit. California dairy is ridiculously subsidized. Subsidies have lead to distortions and vulnerability to drought. Topsoil loss in the midwest is also shortsighted. Most of the policies had foundations in managing resources but they have become the playthings of commerce and government. Our government grants person hood to corporations. Corporations are allowed as a public good. However they can't be jailed. The expectation should be is that they are no better than sociopaths that cannot be held accountable. They need to be regulated. Self regulation may be best but it needs oversight to keep it effective. We need to do a better job of cleaning up politics.
So all those 1930's Dust Bowl farmers moved from the plains to California just because the desert was more picturesque?
The article made a compelling point with facts until it got to the crazy "in this era of climate instability" political rant at the end. Some people are so crazy they can't help but shoot themselves in the foot.
Do you drink piss?
Yes, I do. So do you unless you drink water you captured in a rain storm. Have you never heard of a wastewater treatment plant?
Alfalfa growers are now exporting some 100 billion gallons of water a year from this drought-ridden region to the other side of the world in the form of alfalfa.
I think your math is a bit off. California only produces about 7 million tonnes of alfalfa anualy. a tonne of pure water is about 250 gallons, so even if alfalfa were pure water, your math is off by a couple of orders of magnitude.
the above is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect that of the little voices in my head
The truth is, alfalfa is used for milk production, not meat production. If you want to fatten up a cow, you feed them grains. You know, the carbohydrates that America uses as a primary source of their diet; which is why America is obese. The article talks about the cost of alfalfa driving up up the cost of beef. It is true that the Imperial Valley alfalfa farmers can ship their alfalfa to China on the empty cargo ships returning to China and make more money than they can shipping up to San Joaquin Valley where the dairies exist. The impact has been on milk prices and horse ranches. Alfalfa went from $9 for a 140 lb bale to $17 for a 100 lb bale. That upswing did nothing to meat prices. During this upswing, beef was incredibly cheap. I stuffed my freezer with $4 a pound rib eyes. There are other market forces that are now bringing beef prices up. The American herd is at a 60 year low. More people, less beef, more money.
I do believe the water figures given for vegetables to be fairly consistent. Most of that water doesn't go into producing the product, but instead evaporates off leaving the salts behind that ultimately destroys the land for farming. We have switched to hot house hydroponics. It uses a little as 1/20th the water as conventional farming. The reduction in pesticides is drastically reduced. The fish and crustaceans provide the nutrients that the plants need, and the plants and bacteria break down the fish wastes purifying the water. A hot house produces a tremendous amount of food.
If feels to me that the author as ideological agenda. The truth is, we are designed to eat meats, eggs and vegetables. Everything else, not so much. The American diet has caused an epidemic in obesity, diabetes and Alzheimer's. This is directly a result of what we eat today. You can read, "Grain Brain" for a neurosurgeons take on this subject.
There is. It is called extraterrestrial colonization.
"The Santa Clara Valley Water District estimates it will lose up to $20 million because of its request last month for a 10 percent voluntary reduction. L.A.'s Metropolitan district expects to lose $150 million by asking for 20 percent voluntary cutbacks." Paul Rogers, San Jose Mercury News, 2/15/14.
The article goes on to say that some agencies have raised rates in the past to make up the difference.
A lot of green power sources like wind are only usable for peak load generation, why not use unclaimed power for feeding seawater desalination? California has something in excess of 3GW of wind power and a rough figure of 14kWH/kgal of Pacific Ocean desalination.
If 10% of that power were available for generation but unusable by the grid on a daily basis, you could desal 21 million gallons of water or nearly 8 billion gallons per year. It's only 3% of the LA area annual use, but it's basically free water since the wind is blowing but there's no use for the power in the grid.
As renewables grow, something like this could be a great power sink for renewables that can generate at rates beyond what the grid can absorb and would otherwise be shut down. The desal plant could power/up down based on the need to absorb more or less electricity.
You're absolutely right.
I hope, though, that no one is letting this distract them from the environmental and national resource damage of the meat they're eating. Precious little of the cattle being eaten by Americans or Europeans is being fed on healthy, unirrigated grasslands.
We need to gradually make sure that water is priced right. If we are currently subsidizing the cost of providing water then we need to make sure the charge for it accurately reflect the cost. We shouldn't do it overnight. Change the price gradually over a decade. Hopefully that will act to reduce the usage. If it doesn't then we might have to start overcharging for it.
An equation easily solved. Just move closer to the coast. That way we can use up the sea until there's nothing left. It'll also make it easy for the aliens to destroy us when they shatter the moon and have it's parts crash into the ocean. Anything on the coast is destroyed. My alien masters have advised me so.
If you're buying bottled water in preference to drinking tap water, then you're not actually poor.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
You do realize that most water molecules aren't actually "used" in the sense of having been destroyed and no longer available, right? The issue isn't how much water algriculture "uses" but getting that water back into the cycle more quickly.
Obligatory XKCD.
One quarter of all the water used in California is used to grow Alfalfa. The total value of the annual alfalfa crop is about $750 million, compared to the state's entire agricultural industry of $45 billion (i.e. it is about 1.5% of the value produced), and the state's entire economy of $1800 billion (it contributes 0.04% of the state GDP) - cities run on water too.
The only reason that alfalfa growing is profitable is that taxpayers are paying for the growers water. The alfalfa plantations pay as little as 10% of the actual cost of delivery, and furthermore have guaranteed access to the water. This is under a 1902 law to encourage family farms and were limited to 160 acre farms - but over time lobbying drove that up to the un-small size of 960-acres, and today the subsidy is given to huge corporate farms that amalgamate holdings of scores of "farms" that exist only on paper, with no families to be seen.
As with mid-west farm subsidies, benefits once handed out long ago for reasons that became irrelevant generations ago just seem impossible to shut off.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Humans have been turning desert into agricultural land via irrigation since the time of the Mesopotamians.
That doesn't make it a good idea. A little is fine but we've gone WAY past just a little. Just because we can do it doesn't mean we should.
Most of California is too dry to maintain agriculture and cities without irrigation.
Which offends me less than the existence of cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix. Why on earth anyone would think the middle of a desert is a good place to build a major metropolitan area eludes me. That said, if its too dry then perhaps it might be worth being careful what quantity of crops you plant there as well as the amount of water they need.
Which was working well until the government decided to dump massive amounts of water to protect a bait fish.
The fact that this was a problem almost certainly means they were diverting too much water to begin with.
The fact of the matter is, water in California is dirt cheap. I paid about 3 times more in water rich Pennsylvania that I ever have in parched Southern California.
Meat does not "make the planet thirsty". It stays on the planet to begin with. Oh, and the polar ice caps are melting. Quench your thirst with that, idiots.
Simple: the feds need to stop subsidizing water redistribution.
If California needs water to have a bountiful strawberry industry, then California (or better still, strawberry farmers) can pay for it.
Yes, that means the price of strawberries go up.
But who should pay for strawberries:
- the person that buys and eats them, or
- the person that buys and eats them PLUS the hundreds of millions of taxpayers dinged little tiny bits of money to go to make sure that strawberry is affordable?
-Styopa
The remarks confuse cattle with beef cattle. So of those cattle being fed alfalfa are grown for beef. Others are used for dairy products such as milk. And keep in mind that the snow falls in the distant mountains close to that farmland. The coastal cities of California are affluent enough to use desalinization techniques. Israel is weathering its drought quite well because it has developed technology to do that.
Gallons-to-tons as the metric? What happened to meters and kilograms?
Let's look at the energy content for some different meat and vegetable products:
Lean steak: 1.86 cal/g
Lard: 8.85 cal/g
Broccoli: 0.34 cal/g
Beets: 0.31 cal/g
Meat products appear to contain between 5 and 29 times more energy per unit gram than the vegetables while requiring 47-77 times more water using the author's unchecked (but I assume biased!) stated water usage values).
So the ratio of energy/water usage ratio for meat versus vegetables is about 3.5:1. That isn't as egregious as the OP makes it sound.
Also, many meateaters will not replace their meat diets with legumes, nuts and tubers. Just like many vegetarians will not replace their legumes, nuts and tubers diets with meat.
If I stop eating meat that won't stop the California producers from exporting their product to Asia. Don't try to make me responsible for their excesses. By suggesting Californians should turn vegitarian to save water is blaming the victim, and if it has ANY effect on meat export, it will probably just increase it.
'If Californians were eating all the beef they produced, one might write off alfalfa's water footprint as the cost of nurturing local food systems. But that's not what's happening. Californians are sending their alfalfa, and thus their water, to Asia.'
What does the alfalfa being sent to Asia have to do with the beef produced in California? Are they shipping it *inside* cows produced in California?
On a more serious note, cows also produce milk and urine. Some portion of this makes it back into the water table. Also, a lot of the "ton produced" of vegetables are inedible/garbage, either from rot or other parts, such as leaves, husks, stems, shells, peels, etc. At least by the time it gets to the home, there's far less meat waste than veg waste.
Sugar beets also are rarely used by themselves. They're further processed into sugar, and I'm pretty certain it's not a 1:1 ton ratio after processing. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_beet#Production_statistics: "Imperial Valley (California) farmers have achieved yields of about 160 tonnes per hectare and over 26 tonnes sugar per hectare.", which gives ~300k per ton of sugar, not counting whatever is used in the processing down to sugar.
Not sure if it's nearly enough to offset the stats. Just saying you can take a bunch of numbers, sort them by your bias, and win.
Water is used
Water evaporates or goes into the ground
Water is recycled
Water doesn't go anywhere
End of story
Because we can throw billions away for weapons, oil and shit we don't need but can't throw a few % of that money towards purifying the water from the ocean.
Instead we should stop eating meat and continue to waste money on shit that we don't need.
MAKES SENSE.
No wonder having a conversation with most vegetarians is a waste of time. They always manage to ignore the big picture.
So what I'm reading into this is we need to switch to new Zealand lamb and other examples of non-local sourced meat.
Desalination cost 5x the average for urban water, which is 4x the price agriculture pays unless they pump groundwater. Some places in the state rely only on surface water, they are out of the loop for the various state and federal water distribution systems; no amount of desalination is going to help them. In the end, cities near the coast will pay whatever it takes to keep the faucets flowing, but desalination will not solve the water dilemma for the Central Valley.
Overall, the urban centers have been trailblazers in conservation; water consumption has remained constant for the last 40 years in the Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco metropolitan areas, with a population increase of 35%. Contrast this to agriculture, which has had a reduction in the acreage over the last 40 years, yet it still uses close to 80% of the water.
I'm all for restoring wetlands but we should prioritize water for human Drinking during droughts. The problem is that farmers don't pay fair market value for water. If they had to pay for their water like everyone else they wouldn't be growing rice in the desert. If California is so broke, how can they afford such massive subsidies to farmers at the expense of the city folk?
The reason they won't look at desalination is because it counts as a new source of water, one that farmers can't demand be provided to them at a subsidy. Deep aquifers are old water, and therefore covered under existing water rights.
But think of the small family farmer and their way of life... Nobody like the big agri business.
Not sayn' that's my opinion, but that is oft dragged out as a counterpoint to your argument.
but this sounds like my typical weekend.
Remember when /. was "news for nerds, stuff that matters?" When the heck did it become "propaganda distribution for damn hippies, shit that just enough people care about to be really annoying?"
Did these people miss the part of elementary school science class where when you water a plant, most of that moisture later evaporates and condenses into clouds in the sky, which then become rain and come back to earth? Or maybe the part where those acres and acres of green things also take CO2 and turn it back into O2, which allows us humans to keep breathing successfully?
Someone needs to offer these people a nice juicy top sirloin with a side of bacon if they'll just shut the hell up. If I want more legumes I'll eat a can of baked beans with my steak, dammit.
But, you have described the basics of economics. Substitutions or replacement goods, inferior goods, ...
So what if it takes teragallons of water to produce a gram of meat? The water returns. It evaporates, and returns as rain. Recharging the water table. In my neck of the woods, we both raise beef and other evil meat, and have copious springs jetting pure water out in the mountains. Lots of creeks and rivers, no one going thirsty.
Now the reason that I say that is that it's not our particular problem, if people in the already parched Western USA are going to have to go all Dune and start wearing stillsuits because they've already drained the Colorado River dry, and will do so to all the other rivers there soon, well that is just the inevitible result of trying to stuff more people into an ecosystem than the ecosystem can support.
And while we are on the topic, if you want to see the inherent moral superiority of Veggie culture, take a plane trip over the midwest. See all those white circles? You drain the Oglalla to grow wheat and corn, and soy, and send the topsoil down the Mississippi, and replace a little bit of it with all the dissolved salts in the water. That makes the land nice and unsuitable for much of anything.
Please vegans, stop with the assumed superiority of the prey lifestyle. None of us live forever, as some seem to think, and you are all not so pure and wholesome as you want to think you are. If you want to eat whatever it is you want to eat fine, but seriously, you really aren't better than the rest of us.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
# I've been through the dessert on a hors d'ouvre with no name,
it feuillete good to be out of the rain
in the dessert you can't rum baba your name,
kos there ain't wonton for to give you no pain
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The issue is the micro-biome of cows when it comes to methane production. We can fix this. As for water, better desalination technology.
I hate the defeatism these types portray.
Oh no you don't...
A max of 5 people will fit in my vega...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/1971_Chevy_Vega_Panel.jpg
You'll note that the reason they're losing money is not because the water is more expensive but because people's voluntary conservation efforts have reduced the amount of water being purchased.
This all assumes that animals are fed in feedlots etc. If the animals were free ranging pasture animals eating grass, not grains etc, their water use would be vastly less. Oh, the "export" of water through alfalfa would be minimal as they dry it before use/shipping so you're only exporting carbon, not water.
It's been raining hard in Johannesburg for about 3 weeks solid so far, and no end in sight.
beef cycles water, else they would explode! they give a lot of the water back as sweat, and urine, etc. Running cattle on desert is stupidity, almost as stupid as people who believe that turning everyone to vegan would not bring on it's own sowing, fertiliser, and irrigation problems. They should also sight the origin of the water use research as it seems to be a vegan resource that pops up constantly, i.e. have the details been peer reviewed? Where would our woolly jumpers come from?
There was an unknown error in the submission.
That's only half true. What goes in, is clean water. What comes out is urine, sweat and faeces. While it is true that the H2O molecules don't disappear, and are technically recoverable, I would call this consumption of water.
California is trying that, it just takes years to develop these plants. The water from the plants is still more expensive than normal water, but it's a reliable, drought-proof source, which is obviously really desirable right now. See http://www.npr.org/2014/02/26/....
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
Not only should we shift towards a more vegetable based diet (for so many reasons it is absurd that we haven't), but places like California should look toward aquaponics to better use the diminishing supplies of water. I for one do not want to see my environment degraded further by having my Canadian water sold south so we can keep eating the garbage that comes out of the fast food joints North America has become synonymous with.
I proudly accept this fault. I will celebrate with $30 worth of Ribeye tonight, dedicated to jythie.
Sadly, I can't waterboard a live cow in the process.
How many thousands of gallons does it take to keep some douchebag's lawn green in Palm Springs?
At what it costs to pump water nowadays (what with the high price of diesel and electric in CA), you can't make money with row crops anymore. Where I used to live in SoCal was once all onions and carrots and occasionally other vegetable crops. As the cost of water went up, those crops gradually went away (the last onion crop near my place, ca. 2005, was left to rot in the field because the cost of diesel to harvest it exceeded the value of the crop).
That land either went either to weeds or to alfalfa, because alfalfa is the last crop you can make money on. You don't have to plow or plant it every year, you don't need to hire a labor gang to harvest it, and you get multiple crops per year (some fields in SoCal are cut every couple of months year-round), and it doesn't need as much water per ton of product as most row crops do.
As of 2011, alfalfa in SoCal retailed for up to $450/ton (vs. as low as $75/ton for midwestern hay), and since CA restricts hay imports, and since there's little other hay grown in CA, alfalfa had a captive market and growers could sell every bale they could cut.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Unless they're fracking near by and your tap water is flammable.
Initially the 'family farm' size was restricted to 40ac (btw not so much restricted, as what you could homestead) but that quickly proved nonviable, hence the expansion. In a great deal of the American West during the time of expansion, even 160 acres wouldn't feed your family, let alone produce enough surplus to sell a crop.
And see my post above on why many CA farmers (especially in marginal water areas) now grow alfalfa in preference to other crops. It was either that, or go out of business entirely. (Which many did as well.) I watched the change while I lived there. You'd be shocked at how much formerly-productive Calif cropland is now a wasteland of invasive weeds. (Tho where sheep are still pastured, the native grass has recovered.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
So, the solution is to have cut off food exports and force everyone in California to eat recycled tofu. Of course, NYT readers will still enjoy their steaks at the posh fundraisers for 'save the planet' group of the week. Go back into your trust fund hole.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
And you are right, grass evolved to be grazed (and it doesn't really matter if it's bison or cattle). If it's not grazed, eventually it's overtaken by invasive weeds.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
If you think that California has water problems, what about the country of Israel. They turned desert into arable land. They have very substantially less water than does California. However, they don't spray over the fields, they irrigate. By each plant they have a drip nozzle. The plant gets the water, and not the surrounding soil. Do your internet search Californians, look at how water is conserved, and then take action.
If you feel that vegetable growers should be free to spray water willy-nilly, then be prepared to pay double for your vegetables, fruits, and cereals.
Humans, reduce your reliance on beef. Eating more fowl and fish and carbohydrates will prolong your life along with good quality.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
I just posted this but I'll post again.
California should do two things:
1. Desalinization
2. Increase water upstream
The first one is straight forward. You take the water from the ocean, remove the salt and other impurities and pump it into agriculture.
The second one is pretty easy too. California gets a lot of its water from States just to the East. Did you know that there a simple solution that increases water from Utah to California? Pump salt water to the Great Salt Lake. Keep the Great Salt Lake overflowing. You don't have to desalinize the water. You only have to sterilize it. The Great Salt Lake is actually a very good lake for evaporation because it covers a large area and is not extremely deep. Water evaporates, fills the Rocky Mountains with more water, which runs to the rivers and then on to California. This helps Utah, Nevada and CA.
Also, in the event of a flood of the Great Salt Lake (happens like every 20 years), the pipe can reverse and pump water out.
Thing is we are not talking about subsistence prioritization, we are talking about water's usage in what is essentially a luxury industry, an industry that is driving up the cost of everything else in the process. In this case, if we are going to 'prioritize humans' then that is it, humans will consume as much as they can and leave nothing, so there is no point where humans are 'done' and resources can be diverted for preservation.
As for the poor being hardest hit, that is not the fault of the drought, that is the fault of the middle class. Cheap beef raises water consumption and prices of everything else.
The middle class is saying it's actually your fault, something about your humanity, being scatter-brained, and losing something.
Tasty, Tasty Murder. Hmmm... I'm going to have a Ribeye medium rare tonight.
How does it help California for Americans to go vegan when the problem you choose to highlight is alfalfa shipped to Asia? The flow of your post seems to indicate we (Americans who aren't in California) should stop eating any product of California. Then, suddenly you started talking about alfalfa, which I don't eat, and beef, which I require to be grass fed in Georgia. I don't think much California beef gets shipped to the east, it's the cornfed stuff from the Midwest we gotta watch out for.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
It's not that the cows are magically consuming our resources and sends them to another galaxy..
On the contrary, the shit/pee/meat, (sorry for being blunt) are eventually recycled. - So the statements
in the refenced article aren't necessarily fair - imho.
A lot of green power sources like wind are only usable for peak load generation, why not use unclaimed power for feeding seawater desalination? California has something in excess of 3GW of wind power and a rough figure of 14kWH/kgal of Pacific Ocean desalination.
Can you run a desalination plant using a power source where the output varies at random? That's always been the fundermental issue with wind power.
The water isn't disappearing from the planet, but it is disappearing from what is available for use each year, in a state that already has a lot of fights over who gets to use what amount of water each year. Bad summary article wording.
Are you talking about California? Drought doesn't hit poor people any harder than rich in California. Other areas, especially where subsistence farming is practiced, yes.
Absolutely and unequivocally UNTRUE. Drought hurts the poor FAR worse. It hads to do with the percentager of income devoted to food. The wealthy spend less than 5 % of their annual income on food. Price increases due to drought, and the need to buy water instead, have barely any impact. The poor, on the other hand, generally spend 50% of their income on food, and that entails very careful shopping, as they would spenfd more but rent has likely taken up the other half. ANY price increase is devastating...
These silly footprint measures (carbon footprint, water footprint) are finally beginning to wear.
There's lots of stuff that goes into making stuff. Water isn't the only thing that goes into foods A, B, C. Petroleum isn't the only thing that goes into non-foods D, E, F.
Too bad there isn't a way to sum up the stuff that goes into making stuff.
Oh, wait. There is. It's called "money". The total cost of making something is the sum of all that.
Its usefulness breaks down when some entity with guns at its disposal (government, usually) interferes with the process, and makes something artificially expensive or worse, artificially inexpensive. You know, like water in California.
Then you find activities as goofy as people raising rice in a desert. Such as people raising rice in a desert.
But it gets people re-elected, and that's what's important.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
The problem with variability is that when you can generate it, you may not have a need for it. The conventional solution to this is fungible energy storage, some way of storing the energy generated so it can be reclaimed as energy -- batteries, pumped hydroelectric, compressed air, some way of capturing the energy as energy and then using the captured energy as means of generating energy to smooth out variable output to get a consistent production that can be used more as a base load generation.
Energy storage is highly imperfect -- batteries are expensive and limited, pumped storage requires the right geology, etc.
But what if we looked at a simple finished product -- like fresh water -- as basically a second order form of energy storage? Since fresh water from sea water has an energy value, what if instead of looking at energy storage in terms of creating electricity, what if we looked at in instead as a finished product?
So build desalination plants tied to the grid in a way that they can scale up production to continuously absorb the amount of power generated by the variable source -- basically create the grid demand to match the power input instead of trying to match the power output to grid demand. Modern desalination plants using Vacuum Vapor Compression could be built scalable so that they could turn individual units up/down to meet available input power.
Where I live in South Africa, the Karoo region produces arguably the best lamb in the world. The water needed for this is minimal and they feed on karoo vegetation, which is close to bushy succulents. That is also meat, duh!
This whole alarmist trend is bolloks! Systems will correct themselves. If there's not enough water, farmers will start producing something else. And anyway, as the nutritional research of the last decade has shown, fatty meat is a much more efficient source of food for humans than carbohydrates. Some go as far as stating that if we all switched to protein-based diets, we'd cut our consumption in half and in the process, shut down half the food chain stores. Instead of 10000 calories of carbo per day, 3000 calories of protein provide still more energy without turning the eater into an actor in Wall-E!
On the other hand, the authors probably also believe all the warmist speculative nonsense politics, so there's no point in arguing with them: They are quite religious about their position
As a bonus, if we have too much water - we can chuck it back in the sea and get a few KW back http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
Not more dense than sugar beets though, which take less than 1% of the water per ton.
But what is the growing season and temperature requirements
for sugar beets. We are talking about California and WP
reminds me: "In warmer climates, such as in California's Imperial Valley,
sugar beets are a winter crop, planted in the autumn and harvested in the spring."
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.