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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.'"
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.
Can you dispute the statement, or do you just want to attack the person? I love my meat, but if the numbers are true then we have an issue, especially the exportation part.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
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.
Without the fish, your rivers will die.
Why would you want to sacrifice your own healthy river for cattle feed in China?
Or, you know, people could have been smart enough to not irrigate crops in a desert. Nice attempt at counting political coup, though.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
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.
They should send all the Vegans back to Vega
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
Exportation isn't the problem it is with trade imbalance. Ships are coming and going from Asia. It's best if they don't return empty. So there is a discount for goods shipped back, if there is a trade imbalance. So that drives down the transportation cost of goods like alfalfa going back. An American eating less/no meat isn't going to solve that problem. This is economics. So if there is a water shortage, high water usage should be charged based on use of the community resource. Water costs would make it then uneconomical to send high water crops over seas.
Can't have crop subsidies and then complain when farmers grow crops to sell to people that make them money...
Does the high water usage matter?
True, true... But in the the water-deprived future the Spice must Flow.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
don't grow cattle in california.
First, people like to talk about "consuming" water. Water isn't consumed because it isn't turned into something else permanently, unlike say, oil or coal, which do not replenish in a reasonable amount of time. The only time the amount of water being used is actually relevant is when it's being pulled from a finite source for irrigation, like an underground aquifer or a river. A large portion of the planet gets sufficient rainfall to support all manner of agriculture. Raising alfalfa in California is dumb. Raising rice in Japan is not.
Feeding cattle on grassland that is not irrigated is not "consuming" water. As long as the land is not over-grazed it's not really an issue. In fact, the grass needs to be eaten and fertilized to thrive - it's co-evolved with large ruminants like cattle or horses.
So, these statistics are meaningless because it depends on where you're growing the crops as to whether or not you're consuming a finite resource. They're only useful in a local context. There are other side effects of raising cattle, such as deforestation, that are relevant.
The big feature of a meat-based diet is being able to eat all year-round. But for the consumers in major metropolitan markets, seasonality of fruits and veggies has no meaning. We've figured out the supply chain to keep the staples produced year-round.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Not all farm land is suitable for growing vegetables, but it may be suitable for grazing. The big problem we have is that the herds are larger than what the growth on a certain land area can sustain and therefore carbohydrate supplements have to be purchased.
In contrast there's a balanced farming where the area of a farm only have the amount of animals that it can support, no more. Some supplements may be needed even then, but in those cases it's mostly a question of minerals, not carbohydrates.
The amount of water consumed by a bovine is only to some extent wasted, the majority ends up as urine that completes the cycle of returning nutrients to the land where the grazing occurs.
Overall - the major problem with water consumption for beef production is when the farm is unable to support the herd without artificial support.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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.
Hippie version of the scientific method:
1) Form a hypothesis, preferably an unfalsifiable one
2) Cherry pick data and cook numbers to "prove" hypothesis
3) Reject all data that contradicts your hypothesis
4) Promote hypothesis as conclusive science, rake in grant money.
5) Viciously attack anyone who challenges said hypothesis an anti-science "denier."
And if anyone challenges this as the legitimate scientific method, just tell them "clearly you don't understand how science works."
Good thing that you aren't following in that vein then, citing credible sources and supplying a solid, logical argument that can be clearly traced from premise to conclusion. And even better, you're doing it not for your own aggrandizement, but for the betterment of mankind. You go Mr. Anonymous hero!
The only issue we appear to have is that either water is being sold too cheaply or the most profitable use of water is growing animal feed. If water is too cheap then put a small charge on it and spend the money on measures to improve water retention and reduce usage. If Alfalfa is the most profitable thing then you're pretty much stuffed because cutting it back will hurt farmers and the wider economy.
A vegetarian who likes baths, or god forbid has a swimming pool, almost certainly consumes more water than an occasional meat eater with a water efficient home. So rather than blaming meat-eaters, or trying to judge lifestyles as good or bad, let's just stop discounting inefficient water usage and let people decide what use they want to cut back.
If you knew anything about farming you would know alfafa is use in crop rotation to replenish the nitrogen content of soil. It is a legume.
To me the whole thing reads like yet another article advocating the monoculture of soy and corn. Yes lets make cows diabetic too.
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.
There are some major differences in the water.
Animals can move towards water, including many naturally occurring locations. Plants grow where they are planted, and they are dependent on nature giving them water.
Now the real issue is about how we farm. These farms in the dessert, because the weather stays warmer all year, comes at a cost of heavy water usage.
Farms up in the north east are smaller, however they take advantage of many of the natural resources around them, ponds, adequate rainfall. At the expense of a shorter growing season.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
How do you sell something "unilaterally"? Is that the same as giving things away?
How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.
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.
if it harms the overall society in the end.
By that logic, stop using your computer. Between the mining of elements used in its construction, the huge amount of water needed to produce the parts, and everything else that goes into making a computer, it's harming society.
Oh wait, it makes you happy using a computer? Well then, carry on, society be damned.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.
Exactly, water is a renewable resource and extremely recyclable. It's not like the water used to produce any food is all lost to that food. What the food item doesn't retain is passed on to something else.
It all starts at 0
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?
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.
In the end, there will of course be legislation, so that others will have to change their behaviour. That's what it's all about.
How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.
Humans have been turning desert into agricultural land via irrigation since the time of the Mesopotamians. Most of California is too dry to maintain agriculture and cities without irrigation. Which was working well until the government decided to dump massive amounts of water to protect a bait fish.
[Insert pithy quote here]
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.
You sell it without anyone elses involvement...Especially for something like water where ownership of our waterways is tenuous at best.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Computers can have a net benefit to society. We can figure out with their aid how to solve problems, including the ones they cause. Eating a steak solves nothing other than your own personal satisfaction.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
but if the numbers are true
3.3 gallons per tomato? That's a suspicious figure. No, I didn't RTFA, but let's run the numbers... How many tomato plants in an acre? How many fruits per plant? Multiply that by 3.3, and it seems very high.
You're selling it always in the same direction, of course. ;-)
Ezekiel 23:20
By that logic, stop using your computer.
If what you produce on your computer has the same value to society as the AC's excrement, then maybe you *should* consider stopping using it...
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
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.
"Animals can move towards water"
Which means that they rip up stream banks, kill native vegetation, and defecate in the water. Domestic cattle really destructive of the watershed and have a large negative impact on water quality. Also, sure cattle can move, but since the drought is regional they would have to move to Iowa or Indiana to get far enough away.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
Presumably nobody is being dumb enough to sell a gallon of water for 50 cents and then buy it back for a dollar. So who the fuck cares?
Because these are not market forces at play, they are government forces.
It's so bad that government gangs will send men with guns to your house to haul you off to prison (or kill you if you resist) if you collect rainwater from your roof for irrigation or fire protection.
Especially in the Colorado River basin, because "that's California's water." So people who live in the deserts there can have lush shubberies tended by Mexican servants and grow alfalfa for Asia. Have you ever walked down a street in, say, Palm Springs, and noticed the landscaping difference on a vacant lot? It's quite impressive.
If there were strong property rights and markets at play here, then, sure, let the prices fall where they may, but that is entirely not the situation at hand.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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...
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
By that logic, stop using your computer. Between the mining of elements used in its construction, the huge amount of water needed to produce the parts, and everything else that goes into making a computer, it's harming society.
Actually, that's not the same logic, that's a different one (if there is any logic in your claim, that is). "Stop using your computer" would be equivalent to "stop eating", whereas "switch to vegetables" would be equivalent to...I don't know, "start using mentats"? Something like that - replacing stuff with something different of equivalent value, even if it works differently. You haven't proposed a replacement or a substitute.
Ezekiel 23:20
So where is this happening? The article mentions nothing about men with guns being sent, or even them coming to houses who are doing it.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
other think that humans have turned green pasture into deserts since mesopotamia, with irrigation a doomed attempt to postpone the inevitable outcome, accelerating it by adding salinization of fields.
For that pleasure of eating a steak, I provide a fraction of a job to a US farmer, a US rancher, a US butcher, a US truck driver, a US refrigeration specialist and a US checkout clerk, the supply chain for meat is much more constant through booms and busts and spreads the wealth effect much more than for the collection of Integrated Circuits made in china. You smugness on deciding if my lifestyle choices are good or bad for society really prove nothing but liberalism and veganism are nothing but your opinion multiplied by a political correctness that says I cant respond in a human manner. I can only conclude Vegetarianism and Veganism robs the fallowers of this cult the the fats that keep you brain sane,
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.
Worked maybe, and even well for them, but not well overall. There are better places to grow crops, even places not being fully utilized, but they are not on the coast, which is the problem.
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.
Culinary perfection? What the hell is wrong with you? Lots of people find steak delicious. Not everyone has to share your opinion.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Not more dense than sugar beets though, which take less than 1% of the water per ton.
Obviously you cant read. I eat meat, I just had a nice burger yesterday on the grill. That being said you are more worried about the monetary value of the meat, where I am worried about the long term social value of the meat, including the effect of you eating that meat on the availability of resources to your great great grandchildren. My issue is about sustaining the planet, where yours is about sustaining your wallet.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Where, exactly, so you think your drinking water comes from? Animal breath, sweat, piss, and former animal breath/sweat/piss that has already been condensed into current bodies of water on the planet, or trapped in underground aquifers from ancient animals
Water "lost" to a region is that which is directly moved when the food is harvested and trucked out of the area, or evaporation due to agriculture which exceeds the natural evaporation rate and results in dispersion outside of the local climate area.
If you're worried about drinking water, you should lament the rain which falls in the ocean.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
In his defense, the threshold for a comment section is probably a tad lower. Not sure why Cartman hates hippies so much, though.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
to protect a bait fish
Here in the Northeast we eat 'em! More proof that anything is delicious when deep fried.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
There's a simpler solution... less people. Actually, that's the only real solution. Won't happen for decades though because everyone wants their easy solution rather than real solution.
# people * resource usage = total available resources
Or pets. I love vegans who keep a carnivorous "companion animal".
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The statement that they export 100 billion gallons of water in alfalfa is silly. There is a sod farm down the road from me and they water grass like crazy. Is all that water in the grass? When they cut, roll and ship the sod does the water go with it? Nope. Some of the water is used by the grass for it's growth, a lot evaporates and a lot goes into the ground returning to the water table. This is pure propaganda of the worst kind. What about the cattle? How much water is in a pound of ground beef? Hundreds? Of course not! It may take hundreds to grow it but the cows piss out almost all the water they take in. That water doesn't ship with them. There is a cost to grow these things and it does take water but water is replenishable although if you overpopulate an area (California) it will become scarce. Maybe deserts were meant to be dry? This article is sensationalism.
Water table depletion is directly analogous to exhausting an oil or coal resource; you'll get the atoms back in there, but not on the same timescale you took them out.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
Suffice to say, science begs to differ. As it did when people used the same arguments about heredity, the origin of life, the motion of the planets...
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
I don't expect everyone to share my opinion. Where did I say that? My opinion is however, and I can and will defend this, is that there is so much more to food, flavors, cuisine and eating than a simple steak. To deny that is to deny centuries of culinary tradition and excellence. If you look, or taste, beyond the obvious, you may find the experience rewarding.
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
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.
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.
There's a simpler solution... less people.
Oh here we go again..
You want to be the first to volunteer to reduce the population by one? I hear a CPAP mask and a tank of helium are an easy way out..
Good luck trying to convince people to not have children, especially the Bible Belt people who literally believe it's their God-given right to litter the Earth with their offspring. Also good luck convincing any other group of people in the world not to have children for similar reasons, and also because of this insignificant little matter of "propagation of the species" that just happens to be the most basic drive of any living thing.
So what's your solution, smart guy you might say? We need to find a way to get off this planet.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
MEAT IS MURDER
Really, in quite a few places where we grow things in the desert(and they're near oceans), nothing is stopping desalinization plants and wave generators to power them. Except perhaps the will do to it(in some cases nimby), and in other cases political/regional instability.
As for farms being small in the north east and shorter growing seasons? We usually get in at least 2 rounds of crops in the summer, especially if winter wheat is planted. Fallowing properly also helps make sure that you can get two per-season in. And even in the north east, most of those natural resources are man-made and rely on winter snowfall or winter rains depending on how mild the weather is.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.'"
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.
Uh no. Detroit is a place where corporations (and thus, corporatists) were allowed to run amok with their greedy behavior. Nobody claims these people are the smartest among us.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You can also refer to the water table as being an "aquifer" and if you read my post you'll see that I explicitly called that out as finite.
The amount of water consumed by a bovine is only to some extent wasted, the majority ends up as urine that completes the cycle of returning nutrients to the land where the grazing occurs.
I'd wager that 100% of the water consumed by a bovine returns to the environment.
Is everyone now going to treat this as complicated and cherry picking little points like "water is lost"?
The point is that eating meat, especially beef uses up a lot of water. The feedstock for cattle also uses up a lot of water. There is only so much fresh water to go around. Yes, we cannot know ALL the impact humans have, but MORE impact is more impact. Getting an idea of the numbers involved helps people make decisions -- better. We can know that something is a factor of ten more impact -- then we can adjust.
Nuclear energy also uses a lot of water. So does fracking. Often discussion are just in terms of relative pollution or cost, but the impact of nuclear or oil doesn't stop with just one or two measures -- there is an entire chain of impacts. So meat has the feed and the animal -- where the chain for plants is not only farming but also the pesticides and fertilizer.
We have to look at the world as having finite resources now, and we have to say; "What's the best use of such and such with this cost?" If we start publishing the water usage of materials, foods and other things -- people can make conscious decisions. Vegetarianism has a smaller water and energy footprint. It's not that complicated. What do we do with this information is what is important -- and making people aware.
I won't stop eating meat, but I might just eat it once or twice a week
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
I would be more worried about irrigation versus natural water sources. Also there's the problem that water is not actually destroyed in the process of agriculture. It is used and reused and reused again. Although there is the problem of water contamination. That doesn't go away if you trade beef for beans.
These statistics really don't address sustainability at all.
It's really a quite infantile argument not worthy of a tech site like Slashdot.
It's simply not technical enough.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There's a simpler solution... less people.
Oh here we go again..
You want to be the first to volunteer to reduce the population by one? I hear a CPAP mask and a tank of helium are an easy way out..
Good luck trying to convince people to not have children, especially the Bible Belt people who literally believe it's their God-given right to litter the Earth with their offspring. Also good luck convincing any other group of people in the world not to have children for similar reasons, and also because of this insignificant little matter of "propagation of the species" that just happens to be the most basic drive of any living thing.
So what's your solution, smart guy you might say? We need to find a way to get off this planet.
Yeah, here we go again. There is no infinite growth scenario for any species. Education is the solution, not throwing your hands up and saying "it's hard, so why bother." Culture needs to change to encourage individual achievement, not "get all the money I can to pass onto my children." Look at Japan. Population growth is declining, and there are no draconian rules on procreation like in China. As a matter of fact, the government is encouraging procreation.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Sellers and buyers are separate groups...
When you cant win, ad hominem.
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.
The statement that they export 100 billion gallons of water in alfalfa is silly. There is a sod farm down the road from me and they water grass like crazy. Is all that water in the grass? When they cut, roll and ship the sod does the water go with it? Nope. Some of the water is used by the grass for it's growth, a lot evaporates and a lot goes into the ground returning to the water table. This is pure propaganda of the worst kind. What about the cattle? How much water is in a pound of ground beef? Hundreds? Of course not! It may take hundreds to grow it but the cows piss out almost all the water they take in. That water doesn't ship with them. There is a cost to grow these things and it does take water but water is replenishable although if you overpopulate an area (California) it will become scarce. Maybe deserts were meant to be dry? This article is sensationalism.
Sorry, but you seem to have missed the point that the alfalfa is being shipped to China for a profit. Or to put it another way, any water conservation project means cheaper water for the alfalfa growers, which means more profits for the corporations that own the farms. This is corruption at it's worse, to the detriment of the people of California, as well as the environment, in the name of profits.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
You're going to have to treat it regardless. The cost is the same either way.
Banning the consumption of meat will not eliminate agricultural runoff or biological contaminants that have nothing to do with agriculture at all.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
That linked article also states that most of these laws (& of them are over 100 years old) are in the process of being repealed because they are stupid & have scientifically been proven to do not a damn thing in regards to how much water returns to the water table. Sounds like a non-issue & the system is working as designed.
There is a war going on for your mind.
To make your point, you stuffed words into the AC's mouth. Nowhere did he say that steak was "culinary perfection". He just said that it makes him happier than boiled cabbage. I'm no stranger to world cuisine, I live in a good restaurant city, and I'm lucky enough to be in a financial place where I can hit pretty good restaurants once in a while. That said, a good dry-aged steak is still near the top of my list, your pity notwithstanding. Steak is popular despite it's cost because people find it to be quite tasty.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Oregon's far enough.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Not all farm land is suitable for growing vegetables, but it may be suitable for grazing. The big problem we have is that the herds are larger than what the growth on a certain land area can sustain and therefore carbohydrate supplements have to be purchased.
This handy infographic puts that in perspective.
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/la...
There is a war going on for your mind.
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.
The reason this type of propaganda is effective is because you can't dispute the statement, the statement being the California (a state consisting mostly of desert) is having a drought. Also, the numbers are likely correct. What makes this annoying is the proposed "solution" that people should eat less meat which conveniently helps their agenda. Where in the article do they mention desalinization? How about switching from cattle to a less stupid animal? Is there any mention of a solution that makes an actual effort to solve the issue and not to simply mitigate it?
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.
Wah, science is hard. I don't understand, therefor no one does.
Yes the human impact is well understood. The question is only how bad it really is, and what can we do to slow down the destruction. We're not even talking about reversing it yet, just slowing it so that we have more time to study.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Well, you're mostly right - I mean even dried alfalfa is probably made of 90% atoms that used to be air and water before the alfalfa "ate" it. Nothing like thousands of gallons though - that's mostly all waste from getting the water to them inefficiently and just dumping most of it back into the environment. Grow things in a sealed greenhouse and the issue should disappear, even in the desert. There's also secondary issues of water *contamination*, which can be a big problem with both plants and animals.
As for the co-evolution - don't forget the wolves/large predators that are an important part of the equation. They totally change the grazing patterns of ruminants into something that nurtures the land, undisturbed ruminants tend to be extremely destructive. A pretty example: http://www.filmsforaction.org/...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
Well, it is easy enough: http://ohioline.osu.edu/ls-fac... Once the area has been over-grazed and compacted by the animal, the topsoils erodes into the river, leaving only infertile soil where barely anything can grow...
Domestic cattle really destructive of the watershed and have a large negative impact on water quality.
Not so fast... There is a growing awareness that well managed herbivores are the only way to reverse desertification and halt climate change. The key to this counter-intuitive fact is the "well managed" part. (The link above is to a TED Talk by Allan Savory.)
If you put a hundred head of cattle on a hundred acres of pasture, and just leave them there, they will roam around, munching only the most palatable plants (leaving the weeds to thrive), endlessly compacting the soil and disturbing the ecosystem. But if you instead give those same 100-head just one acre per day to graze, they'll eat everything in sight (helping to control weeds), aerate the soil with their hooves, and fertilize it with their dung -- and not come back to the same acre for another 100 days.
This more accurately mimics the pattern found in nature, where herbivores are "mobbed up" and kept moving by predators. And it gives the land time to rest in between visits, allowing the biome to absorb the nutrients and recover from the disturbance. Just look at the before and after photos in Savory's TED Talk to see the effects of well managed herbivores.
Another great example is what Joel Salatin is doing at Polyface Farms in Virginia. (This link is a 10min clip from a talk by Michael Pollan, describing the Polyface model.)
Oh yeah, and then there's the whole "permaculture" movement, as exemplified by Geoff Lawton in his "greening the desert" project in Jordan.
In short, there are many, many options available to us, before we start talking about "going veggie" to save the planet.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
"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!
No this is wrong thinking. Most of the water that is used to generate meat goes into growing the crops to feed the animals, and most of this is lost directly through respiration of the plants. The pee is neither here nor there. Outsourcing your diet by growing plants to feed animals and eating the animals is grossly inefficient on so many levels.
Korma: Good
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.
TFA speaks about alfalfa growers in the Imperial Valley of California, which was and is a desert.
From Wikipedia: "Bordered by sand dunes and barren mountains, it was uninhabited until 1901, when the Imperial Canal was opened and diverted Colorado River water into the valley through Mexico."
With the water restrictions that are coming due to changes in the Colorado River Compact(which is where Imperial Valley gets its water, not from any source in California proper...) the Imperial Valley alfalfa farmers are going to be hard pressed. Their cheap water is coming to an end and they know it...
There are water issues in the norther third of the state regarding the Delta and fish on the Trinity and Klamath rivers. However that is hundreds of miles away in northern California. Maybe those are the minnows you are mentioning. You need to remember though that there is a fishing industry that makes money from the Salmon up there, and they are being hurt by the water being diverted in northern California and southern Oregon for the same type of alfalfa growing...
It's usually better to research what you post before you post it. It saves you from looking like a tool.
Perhaps you should stick to letting Big Money steal elections in Michigan...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
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.
Dude - take a chill pill!
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
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"
What a stupid title
It must be all the juicy steak.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
Yes there are, but those require an open mind, researching your data and ***not having a social agenda***.
I can't help thinking of Charles Dickens' beadle in Oliver Twist. [JOKE]Clearly you need more gruel and less red meat! [/JOKE]
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
I eat meat because meat tastes like murder, and murder tastes pretty dam good!
-Denis Leary
Time to offend someone
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!
but they consume way too much water.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
For those interested in a casual description of this approach, it's explained a bit in the book "Omivore's Dilemma". They follow around the operations of a small(ish) farm doing pretty much this same thing.
Quit pushing your anti-plant agenda!
It may take 20+ years though.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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.
Your logical fallacy is personal incredulity.
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.c...
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
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.
Farms in the dessert? Great, they're feeding frosted cupcakes to cattle now.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
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.
But without Detroit running amok, we wouldn't have Robocop!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Except none of that was in my argument. The OP was providing an appeal to emotion fallacy to support his argument, I was merely pointing it out.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Or.....Educating himself
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I agree. With computers that's easy, use desktops and repair or upgrade them. Use flashblock instead of getting a new motherboard + CPU. Phones are easy too, if I break or lose a phone I get given an old one, pay a fee to unlock in a shop and it just goes on working.. Batteries and chargers are easier to get nowadays.
There is no shortage of water in the world as a whole, and human activities do not "use up" water. It's the most infinitely reusable resource there is. We just need to get serious about desalination. In places like California, cranking out fresh water might be a better use for windfields than trying to shoehorn fluctuating amounts of power into the grid. The new graphene process can be far more efficient than traditional R-O (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/graphene-water-desalination-0702.html)
But of course, you will never hear this argument from "environmental activists," because their whole agenda is fewer people, subsisting in increasingly primitive conditions. If they could engineer a plague that would wipe us all out, they would do it.
Ok, you first.
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.
I thought the point was water usage. I missed the part about money.
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!
This, though I do not agree with Savory 100%.
Agriculture is the most destructive force on Earth, and in basically 100% of the cases the causes of the droughts and problems to begin with.
The only safe and sustainable way to feed the vast majority of people is grazing animals, animals who need to be there in the first place for the ecosystem to not collapse. Feeding the world is not a 0-sum game and cannot ever be. It is not about what takes the least amount of water/damages the least land/hurts biodiversity the least/takes the smallest amount of resources to grow, it is what generates the most clean water, improves the most land, and stimulates the most biodiversity.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The absurdity is that they aren't removing the water from the cycle, just delaying it a few days til they use it to wash their car/horse/whatever.
(cough)bison(cough)...
Indeed. Clearly I need to stay in the cellar for a couple of days to let it work it's way out of my system.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I think they are talking field crops. Say a tomato takes 6-months to grow. Every few days you either water it, or it rains on it (in both cases I think they are counting the water the same). 95% of that water drains past the plant deep into the soil water table, 4% evaporates right back into the air (becoming clouds again), and 1% gets absorbed into the plant. A day latter 99% of that absorbed 1% has evaporated off of its surface. Repeat for 6 months.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Which is arguably why it shouldn't be 'wasted' by producing animal feed that is uses large amounts of water in regions susceptible to droughts.
In the UK the average 4 person family uses 165m^3 of water a year. If they were charged $0.03 per m^3 of water that would add ~$5 a year to their bills. It would also add $500,000,000 to the cost of producing Alfalfa based on the articles figures which might encourage farmers to either grow it more efficiently or grow something that requires less water.
The other solution is to have someone in government deciding what you can or can't use water for, banning some crops, forcing people to grow others etc. Does that really sound like a cheap and/or effective solution? It doesn't to me but then apparently enough dumb-asses on here can't see an argument based on pricing without a knee jerk response of modding it flame-bait it seems.
Not off topic y'all. Dune, sand, dust, no water, climate change. Sheesh, moderator needs to turn in geek card.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
You mean like General Motors, which went bankrupt at the hands of a greedy UNION, and greedy GOVERNMENT?
Or Chrysler, which had to be bailed out and bought out by Italy's Fiat, for the same reasons...?
Or Compuware, another so-called "greedy corporation" which is now being parted out thanks to the recession brought about by the failed economic policies of the aforementioned greedy government?
How about the city itself, where the greed of it's former mayor and corrupt, rotten-to-the-core city "leaders" couldn't plunder it's treasury quite fast enough before getting caught with it's hands in the cookie jar...?
Bash corporations and capitalists all you like, but they are the ones that actually create and maintain the few remaining jobs Detroit has.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
The only water that's actually exported is what remains in the alfalfa that's physically sent, which is a small fraction of what it took to grow it. And just to twist it a bit, how much water does it take to produce a cell phone or computer that's exported to CA, and how much water is exported with it?
Just another day in Paradise
Clean water from hundreds of miles away is contaminated and them it flows into salty ground (see Australia for an example of this.) Some of it evaporates and descends as snow or rain far away from you. A small amount is retained deeper in the ground which would be great for some plants, but not so good for tomatoes or grass.
Water is not destroyed, but you have to pay for more for the next irrigation cycle.
It might as well be destroyed. If this were not true there would not be such a debate on the volume water extraction from rivers and aquifers.
Judging by your use of the word "enviornazi", I'm dubious that any amount of evidence would sway you.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
First of all, I doubt the majority of those concerned about the environment want the human race to decrease in number. That particular agenda is shared by a number of groups.
Second of all, why there is no lack of water in the world, the supplies of fresh water don't seem to nicely mesh up to the areas of the planet we've decided to turn into arable land. Desalinization won't do you a lot of good in areas of the American Midwest that were, until recently, semi-arid areas with frequent drought cycles, as these are a long way from any ocean. Many of these arid and semi-arid areas rely heavily on aquifers, which appear in most cases not to be all that renewable at all.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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. "
Yes, and changing Asian rang habits will not be any rather than changing Californian eating habits.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Yes and no. Once that water has evaporated it's not going to be available for irrigation for a very long time.
That "lost" 98%, which as you correctly note is not "lost" it has merely evaporated or become runoff, is now water that is not available to be immediately used for any other immediate purpose. (Sort of like money and near-money in economics.)
The point of calculating water footprints like this is to determine the sustainability of current practices, it allows you to calculate how much of various crops can be produced with a certain amount of available water.
measuring the amount of water flowing through a meter upstream of the tomato field
And that was exactly the point. These sorts of calculations are very meaningful to farmers who have to beg, borrow or steal that water.
California, this is what you get for attempting to support a massive population in a semi-arid region. (And not just the local population, you crazy fools export that food to places that have a water surplus.)
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Nature may recycle it, but it may not end up anywhere near where you need it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'm old enough to remember why the traditional menu in the Midwest is so bland and homogeneous; there wasn't any alternative. Once the first freeze set in you had a couple of weeks of fresh veggies left, a month or two of fruit, and then you were down to potatoes, carrots, onions, meat, cabbage, and a few apples until late spring. If you wanted anything that wasn't stored in the root cellar you needed to can it in the summer. My mom had a canner, and I still remember sweltering summer days with my mom, grandmothers, aunts and cousins all preparing fruits and veggies by the crate, shelves and boxes of Mason jars in the basement full of beans, peas, and peaches, and the crates of apples that we put in the back corner of the basement and culled every few weeks.
Say what you will about our diet today and the supply chain that supports it, I really LIKE being able to buy tomatoes and grapes in February. Along with hot water, it's one of the great benefits of civilization.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Yes. I keep seeing articles about how much cheaper and easier vegetables are to produce and how much less resource intensive. Then I look at the cost/meal w/ and w/o meat and I'm just not seeing it.
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.
There's a bit of slight of hand in that article. They go on and on about a little fish nobody's ever heard of as if that is the only reason, and they call that water a diversion even though it's really a not-diversion.
They slip in in one place that it's also for salmon. Yes, the incredibly commercially valuable salmon.
It's not just the Bible Belt -- the UN Fundamental Declaration of Human Rights (article 16) declares that "men and women of full age ... have the right to marry and to found a family." It's pretty totalitarian to suggest otherwise... which you really should try to be more aware of, lest it damage your pitch...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Interesting math, which is stupidly hard to get a grasp on because of dumb imperial units.
Beef turns out to have an overall water footprint of roughly four million gallons per ton produced
"four million gallons".
The cited paper gives the slightly more understandable: beef: 15,400 m^3 / ton
Aargh. Which fucking "ton" is that? I assume they mean "tonne" because everything else in the paper is metric:
So it takes around 15,400 tonnes of water to make 1 tonne of beef.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Modern Western Intensive Agriculture is the most destructive force on Earth
FTFY.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
We just need to get serious about desalination. ... But of course, you will never hear this argument from "environmental activists," because their whole agenda is fewer people, subsisting in increasingly primitive conditions. If they could engineer a plague that would wipe us all out, they would do it.
Oh, come off it. You won't hear many environmentalists arguing for desalination because (a) it has enormous energy costs which themselves have environmental impacts, and (b) it's just a band-aid over overconsumption, and it won't discourage people from continuing on an unsustainable trend until we get to a point that technology can't solve.
Plus, you shouldn't mentally lump an entire group in with its extremists. Do you really feel it's fair when people paint all conservatives as white supremacists just because that elements exists at the fringes of the conservative movement? Then it's no more fair to paint all environmentalists as neo-primitive genocidal maniacs. Yeah, they're there, but they aren't the majority by a long shot.
By far, most of us are motivated by concerns over human survival. We're concerned that humanity is steering itself off a cliff and are a willing to make a few economic sacrifices right now to avoid catastrophic ones later. (You know, just like most conservatives want us to do with our national spending.) It's just all about long-term planning and responsible use of resources. It does not involve killing people -- that's what we want to stop from happening.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Except said "fresh" tomato is bred now for travel rather than flavor, then picked way before it is ripe, gassed to turn it red and brought to your store, where you can then buy the flavorless lump of vegetation.
Ugh...first time a few years back, I found heirloom tomatoes, fresh during the summer. I bit into one, and immediately was taken back to childhood when tomatoes had flavor.
Trust me..you're better off in the winter, eating canned tomatoes than "fresh" ones coming from a million miles away.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It will be us. Humanity will end itself in a final explosion of greed, short-sightedness and warmongering.
Eat the rich.
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...
We haven't figured out shit. We're killing everybody with our ability to provide 'fresh' food year round. Every healthy culture had large selections of preserved and fermented foods that were healthier and more nourishing than any of the empty calories covered in pesticide residues that you can now find year round thanks to our wonderful "understanding" of agriculture.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
That's part of the issue - Government Regulations http://westernfarmpress.com/bl...
We buy tomatoes from the supermarket a little green, and then let them ripen on top of the refrigerator. We'll get heirloom tomatoes for making salsa and salads, but for general cooking the others are adequate (except for Romas, which are useless for anything). As soon as the last frost is gone we'll have plants in the ground. Nothing beats a real tomato just off the vine.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
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.
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.
What costs more to treat? Cow piss or fertalized/incectide runoff from crops?
So all those 1930's Dust Bowl farmers moved from the plains to California just because the desert was more picturesque?
You sir, are wrong. What you describe is that we've figured out is how to produce cheap, tasty "food" with high profit margins. Of course you won't get good nutrition from processed crap.
And when you say "every healthy culture" to whom are you referring? There has never been a truly "healthy" culture. Europe? Plague. Ireland? potato famine. Eskimos? Epic osteoporosis. Basically it's always been a fight between nutrition and disease. If anything, this (modern western European) is the first culture to have the highest health and least disease. In fact, our diseases come from over-nutrition and poor choice of consumption. Why? Because we have too easy access and too many tasty choices!
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Clearly you haven't looked at the evidence above, otherwise you'd SEE the difference. The problem is not "insufficient" grazing, it's "un-managed" grazing. (Did you even read the text of my comment?)
And rather than just asserting that some theory is BS, why don't you link to (or at least describe) an argument to the contrary?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
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
They do actually sometimes fatten cattle with "candy, hot chocolate mix, crumbled cookies, breakfast cereal, trail mix, dried cranberries, orange peelings and ice cream sprinkles."
http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/1...
human activities do not "use up" water
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Of course we use up water... we transform USABLE WATER into UNUSABLE WATER at a certain RATE. This is why certain rivers no longer reach the ocean. And it's why certain aquifiers are simply depleting.
We just need to get serious about desalination.
Oh, stop it. If you can't desalinate in California with a massive coastline, large number of sunny days, and hordes of greenies, then you can't do it anywhere in the United States. As ever, there's a social element that precludes achieving desalination in coastal places, and I'll just spell it out for you: Coasts tend to be monopolized by rich people, and they don't want smelly nasty industrial plants clogging up 'their' coasts. To desalinate in California, you'll have to give up on doing it at the coasts themselves, and run a predictably expensive pipeline from the coasts into the inner zones where land is not only cheaper but isn't infested with arrogant and egotistical rich people and Liberals. Poof! Therefore desalinization in CA is pretty much impossible, and not just for purely financial reasons that you can put on a spreadsheet in a proposal. And if you don't think so, chum, then I dare you to even come up with a proposal, just to watch you get shot down by every permitting official and NIMBY lawsuit known to man.
Slash and burn farming the rainforests is not a form of modern western intensive agriculture.
Look at one of those maps that shows population density by geographic area. See the overwhelming preference for living near coastlines? Desalination on a large scale would get new supplies of water to people where they are most concentrated. If the fourteen million people of greater Los Angeles no longer needed to suck water from as far away as Wyoming, the inland supply would be perfectly adequate for the local population. Resources like the Oglalla Aquifer would once more be an adequate buffer for inland wet/dry cycles.
Multiply that by 3.3, and it seems very high.
It is, indeed, very high, but still true.
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
He doesn't need a citation. Eating animals is bad and so are you, eat more vegetables. Got it?
The rainforests are just the latest targets of industrial agriculture. In the US, for example, all of the slash and burn to destroy the deciduous forests of the mid-west took place after the natives were sent packing to reservations. Since then, it's been just standard "modern" farming with tractors and chemicals leaving the soil barren most of the year. The dust bowl on the prairies was a direct result of the "sodbusters" removing native vegetation.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I was on a plane from ATL to PHL recently. Upon boarding, I noticed some of my fellow passengers were wearing some clothes that seemed anachronistic. Based on this observation, along with the flight's destination, I figured they were Amish or Mennonites or some other fringe religious people. Then arrived the passenger that had reserved the seat next to mine: a woman, perhaps around 50 years of age, somewhat overweight, dressed in sweatpants and a sweatshirt. She seemed like your run-of-the-mill cat lady, or perhaps someone you'd see at your local Walmart store.
In any case, after we had landed, while we were waiting to deplane, this woman started talking to some of the Mennonite folks. Apparently she was a member of their fringe religion from the Lancaster area as well, and the conversation quickly turned to feats of human reproduction. The oddly-dressed gentleman expressed to my neighbor that he had, among other progeny, 49 grand-children. Forty nine. Seven squared. My neighbor replied that she had "only" thirty-something (I forget the exact number, as it wasn't quite as impressive as this gentleman's). At this point I noticed that other passengers in my vicinity shared my disbelief by the extent to which their eyes were bulging from their heads.
When I encounter people like this, I find that I become sad. Sad because I have, after extensive deliberation, decided to abstain from reproducing. Not because I don't think it's pleasurable to have children of my own, no. On the contrary, I'm convinced that having children satisfies some primal urge to propagate one's own genetic material. Ask any parent, and very rarely will you hear wholesale expressions of regret. No, I chose to abstain from reproducing because I believe it's the only responsible choice to make. There's seven billion of us, and I really think that's plenty. If there were only seven million, well, that would be much more reasonable, and I would have no qualms about having some kids of my own. However, that ship has sailed, and we're well past that point now. So I do the only thing I can do; I find solace in the fact that I'm not a part of the problem. The sadness that I feel, though, is not for myself. It's for these 49 grand-children that will be raised in a world of increasing scarcity, where people find themselves waging war over something as [formerly] abundant as clean water. They didn't ask for the shitty lives that they will inevitably have, and it's immoral for their parents to force this upon them.
Aside from the sadness, there's a bit of anger. Anger, because here I am, making a personal sacrifice for the greater good, only for a single ignorant asshole to gobble up any impact from my sacrifice tenfold. Fuck you, you greedy, self-centered, myopic uber-breeders. Fuck you very much.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
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.
Thank god the white man killed the 60 million buffalo that used to rip up the stream banks, kill natives, and shit in the water.
There is. It is called extraterrestrial colonization.
Sounds like your view of the facts are based upon nothing but what Rush told you. But please do go ahead, you are humerous in your infantile fury.
"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.
Here's my favorite: "If God didn't mean for us to kill animals for food, then why did He make them out of meat?"
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.
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?
Sadly, your personal sacrifice is of very little import. Mennonites and Amish are pretty much self-reliant, so their impact is not as great as you think.
So? Slash and burn doesn't poison the soil and the water table and actually restores nutrients to the soil.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Easy sir, you're showing the 'pedigree' of your education.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
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.
Regarding the first part of your comment, see the tragedy of the commons.
Regarding the second part, I think you're underestimating the power exponential growth. Or perhaps I'm underestimating the death that stems from living like luddites.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
The farmer? ADM, Monsanto, Cargill, Dupont are your farmers subsidized by taxes.
The rancher? works for Tyson, Cargill, JBS or National Beef and is probably a migrant worker.
The butcher? Same as above.
The truck driver? works for them too.
HVAC repairs are hardly funding the middle class, same with the checkout clerk.
so your choice is really the 50 or so Inc's, cult indeed...the choice isn't either or as most of the fat in your diet is probably corn, soy or canola based.
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.
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
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.
Modern Western Intensive Agriculture is really just agriculture, taken to its logical conclusion in post industrial society. Agriculture, as it has been for millennia, is monoculture, you can grow plants in a non monoculture way but that is not farming/agriculture as it has ever been done. Yes there are a lot of stupid blind things that agriculture has done (and modern agriculture has only added to these), but for the most part after you take the premise of monoculture the vast majority of modern agriculture is reasonable and necessary additions to that. Pesticides are necessary when you have an entire state painted in a single strain or a single species of plant. Yes in the past they did it smaller and they had some great tricks that we have forgotten to make it work better, and in cases it can even work very very good. And modern post industrial agriculture does exasperate the problems with 1000 acres fields, but the problem really is in the initial premise of monoculture/fields in the first place. There were entire agriculturally created ecosystem collapses thousands of years ago.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
It goes way beyond that. The fact that you are using it for deslanization and pumping of that water means that the uneven production of renewable resources don't matter. So, you produce more fresh water during the day than at night. A step further is that by pumping the fresh water to dams, you would be abe to use that fresh water as a giant clean battery for any renewable energy sources that are built as well
Nuñez!.
There's a difference between free ranging bison and fenced in domestic cattle. BTW, bison tastes better, IMO.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Forests naturally restore their own nutrients, slash and burn washes 99% of the nutrients away.
It has been done for millennia by the native population for the most part in small enough amounts to not be completely unsustainable, but yes international corporations are 900 times worse that small scale native SaB.
In general this is how natives have farmed in recent years in tropical forests, though there has been some success is getting then to stop. Interesting though is that there is archaeological evidence that at least some of these cultures used to understand how to sustainable and stably farm in the distant past.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
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.
Of course desalination is going to require more energy, which is why the 'activists' oppose every energy project that comes along, even these: [link to solar farm v. brown tortoise].
If there's an opportunity to stick it to the human species, they will take it.
*sigh*
First of all, like any group, there are factions within that place different priorities on different things. Take for example, the split in the Republican party between the social conservatives and the libertarians on issues like medical marijuana. Or between the business community and the law & order faction on illegal immigration. What's going on here is a battle between conservationists and green energy people, but you can't just selectively pick one faction's views and attribute it to everyone under the same tent. That's just as unfair as when liberals were screaming "Blood for oil!" about Iraq when there were a wide variety of reasons that Republicans thought the war was a good idea.
So the second thing is that neither group is motivated by wanting to "stick it to the human species." That's ridiculous on its face, and I think you have to know that. The first things you should think when looking at a political cause is, "Why would idealists support it?" and "Why would selfish people support it?" Then, evaluate any claims the opposition makes in that light and see if they pass a sniff test or if they just sound like self-serving demonization.
People who want to preserve other species aren't doing out of hatred for humanity. They have a variety of idealistic reasons: some have a desire to preserve the turtles for the future generations for aesthetic and utilitarian reasons, some think it's a matter of the other species' right to exist alongside us, some worry more about the way that removing a species can have massive network effects on the environment in unexpected ways. Then of course, there's selfish reasons like NIMBYism, e.g. Cape Cod windmills. No one is going, "Ha ha! Another blow against the human race!" (Well, okay no one but a few nuts, but every political group has got a few.)
So, no, that's not the reason. You may have different priorities from conservationists, but you do yourself and the country a major disservice by claiming your foes are all baby-eating monsters. Nothing of value will get done in this country again if we don't all learn to talk like adults to each other.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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.
My Apogee for my Perigee.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
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.
Humans have been turning desert into agricultural land via irrigation since the time of the Mesopotamians. Most of California is too dry to maintain agriculture and cities without irrigation. Which was working well until the government decided to dump massive amounts of water to protect a bait fish.
Working well?
Do a little research on the long term effects of irrigation. Also do some research on where the irrigation water comes from for California. Does California have the right to confiscate water from other states? Does California have the right to demand an irrigation canal be built from the great lakes to California? Do other states have the right to the water that flows in their states?
Does the state of California have the right to kill off any and all creatures, including those in other states because Guvmint iz eval?
Your Fox news, simplistic view of this matter just shows your overwhelming ignorance. Do a little research, or just continue to rail.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
You can have an agenda. You just need to be able to realize it's wrong when you look at facts.
Open data, Critical thinking skills and an actual open mind.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
All agriculture is destructive by definition. We don't need to false dichotomy here, TYVM.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It is misleading though. Many cattle are raised on grassland and that grass is not irrigated but grows due to rainfall. But the stats will add in that rainfall as part of water consumption of beef. Hay can consume a lot of water but it is a supplemental feed for pasture cattle for winter time use (though dairy cattle it may be the bulk of the feed). This is also part of the problem with the drought: pasture land isn't growing as much grass so then more hay is needed.
Also note that the water isn't lost. Ie, 102,000 gallons of water for one ton of starchy roots, but most of that water is reclaimed in that it evaporates and becomes rainfall somewhere else. Even the water that remains with the vegetables eventually gets returned to the ecosystem. It's really only a problem with a drought.
In some places meat is the only way to turn those grasses and leaves into human food, especially if the climate isn't good enough for regular farming.
If there are people who are upset at all this and think we need a vegan diet to save the planet, then ask them how many gallons of water are needed to raise a human child to adulthood and old age? Are these people following the unscientific advice to drink 8 glasses of water a day and stay hydrated? If cattle take up too much water, then so do lions and gazelles.
"iety. Agriculture, as it has been for millennia, is monoculture, you can grow plants in a non monoculture way but that is not farming/agriculture as it has ever been done. "
You could have just said you have no clue about modern farming techniques instead of using a long winded and ignorant sentence.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Desalination is extremely power hungry. Which means huge amounts of coal, natural gas, petroleum, or other non-renewable energy sources. This could be done with wind or solor but the output of desalination will not be very much, the expense will be huge. So the FIRST step should always be conservation and recycling/re-use.
I do, that's why I only had 2 kids.
Ad you can put measures in place to discourage having more then a couple chilred.
I say the following statement as someone who benefits from it: Stop giving tax breaks for children
give people 1000 tax break for not have any children, 500 for having 1, 0 for having 3, -500 for 4 and so on.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
No. Fuck you very much.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
# 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."
That would reduce growth in the future population, but it wouldn't do anything to reduce the current population.
That's with the old technology. If the graphene scheme is workable, we would no longer be stuck with R-O and distillation.
We need to wall off the golden gate! Think of all the fresh water we will save.
Not all of California is desert. Also calendar year is a terrible period to look at California rainfall. End of winter snow pack is the critical #.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Until the Sacramento river stops running into the SF bay we also, technically, have a water surplus.
The S cal is trying. But N cal isn't giving up without a fight. Nobody will let LA do an Owens valley/CO river on them. Dry season water rights are taken (thank god we didn't let them suck too hard back in the 70s), so S cal will have to take water in rainy season and store it. The prototype is to damn up a dry valley and pump water uphill during winter. This water would have uselessly run into the SF bay, absent pumping.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Not all self-absorbed assholes are hippies, but all hippies are self-absorbed assholes.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
When you see reflexive use of irrelevant legal obstacles applied serially to every project Just Because, you know there's an anti-human agenda going on, especially when discussion of the project in online fora is laced with posts explicitly wishing for "reduction in human population" and faux nostalgia for primitive living standards.
Consider Ivanpah itself. A solar thermal plant is a tall skinny power planted in the ground with an ammonia circulation between a heat collector atop the tower and a heat sink (radiator) at the bottom. The tower is surrounded by a field of passive mirrors, each with a sun position sensor and independent tracking positioners. From the time the sun rises, each mirror simply keeps itself positioned to reflect its patch of sunlight onto the top of the tower, which gets hot enough from the sum of the mirrors to feed a Carnot-cycle generating plant.
Opponents of the plant (note the use of terms like "Big Solar" in their screeds; whenever ANY energy source gets concentrated enough to actually create some energy, it becomes Evil.) had to be really creative to figure out how a project like this could damage the environment, given that the ammonia recirculates and the high temperature at the top of the generating tower is not created by "making" sunlight; the illumination on it comes from moving the sunlight falling on each mirror to one spot on the tower. Each mirror stands up above the ground on poles, so that the total environmental effect of the array is a patch of shaded ground in the middle of a totally empty desert. The idea that such a thing affects the desert tortoise, a species which has lived in the open desert for millions of years. in any way is an insult to our intelligence. IF tortoises don't like the shade, they can sidle over a few feet.
How would I fix this problem? By changing the rules by which activists get use of the legal system. For each type of energy project, let us develop standard designs. Safety, siting and environmental impact would be components of the standard. As each such design gets a science/engineering signoff, developers would have an automatic right to build an energy plant of the approved design. To file in court, opponents would have to prove that some aspect of the standard for that source had been violated ("Aha - a windmill closer than half a mile from the nearest house!").
Water rights laws are well established. West of the Mississippi, water rights go by seniority. First are ecosystem rights (which is new law, they predate all human water rights), then it's oldest first.
Just because you are upriver, doesn't give you the right to divert the whole river. The guy downriver, who's diversion predates yours, will win in court every single time. Your dam will be torn down and your kids college fund liquidated to pay damages.
People died over these issues. More then a few.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Just because you are upriver, doesn't give you the right to divert the whole river. The guy downriver, who's diversion predates yours, will win in court every single time. Your dam will be torn down and your kids college fund liquidated to pay damages.
People died over these issues. More then a few.
Oh yes. and there might come a time when more will die over the first paragraph I quoted. Secessionist war might just erupt over water rights
Even then, it would be temporary at best. There are simply too many people, and not enough water in the area. And desalination would take nuclear level amounts of electricity. Ive seen the future, and Dune will have been a documentary, not sic-fi.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
You think permaculture is destructive?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
If it comes to that, the rest of the western US is fucked. CA simply has a much bigger economy and can support a much bigger army.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Nice strawman. We are not there yet, I would rather spend money on desalination plants, to get them perfected, but that is a strawman, because we dont have that yet. That means they are not ignoring the bigger picture, you are. Your short term pleasure seems to be more important than long term survivability of the species.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
FTFY
Believe it or not, Slashdot headline writers, California is not the whole planet.
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Yeah. The Supox were offended.
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.
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.
I misunderstood, my mistake.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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...
I like ripe fresh romas for salsa....less liquid to water down the fresh salsa.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Yet he's using the same dubious arguments advanced by people who didn't like science treading on those.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I would modify that last statement to be "not letting your social agenda affect your research, your report or the your release of either" (or something more compact that gets the same point across). Very few foundations fund research out of the goodness of their hearts, so most of the time (if not *all* of the time), their research is structured specifically to give them what they want (e.g. wording survey questions a specific way). Or if that's not possible, they cherry pick data. Or they simply don't release their findings, if it turns out it won't help their cause.
Anyway, the links in the parent post show some incredible stuff, and pretty much all the scientific criticism I can find is led by one man, Dr. David Briske from Texas A&M. So we have one guy with extensive credentials that says it works, one guy with extensive credentials that says it doesn't, and a slew of others who have tried it (or something similar) with varying results. I'd like to see Savory get a bigger tract of land and a larger herd to see if it can scale. Same with the permaculture stuff: we've got deserts right here in the US, let's see what these guys can do.
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.
Sigh. First of all, Detroit has been run by unions, mafia, and Democrats with corrupt city government since the 60s. Is that who you're blaming? Who exactly are you pointing the finger at? Who was greedy, and got rich? Oh, and where did all that money go? Having grown up there, I think I know the answers, but I'd love to hear your side since you seem to think you know.
Just another day in Paradise
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?
Perhaps I need the sarcasm alert lit up. That's what I say whenever someone starts preaching the V.
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
There are some major differences in the water.
Animals can move towards water, including many naturally occurring locations. Plants grow where they are planted, and they are dependent on nature giving them water.
Now the real issue is about how we farm. These farms in the dessert, because the weather stays warmer all year, comes at a cost of heavy water usage.
Farms up in the north east are smaller, however they take advantage of many of the natural resources around them, ponds, adequate rainfall. At the expense of a shorter growing season.
Read my comments lower down in the listings.
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.
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
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.
Bad phrasing for sure, but it is an issue. There is a total amount of useable water in California each year, and many competing interests. This alfalfa does make 100 billion gallons "disappear" from the pot of total useable water each year. The rivers and rain provide a set amount for California, and that amount is low enough that people always fight about who gets what percent of that set amount.
I've read a few articles and seen that Ted Talk. Managed herds do seem promising for 'greening deserts', but I have yet to hear anyone involved with this suggest that roaming herds could replace our meat industry.
We consume WAY WAY more meat then managed roaming herds could provide. There just isn't enough land on the planet to give 100 cattle each 100 acres.
Sure, some of our meat could (and is right now) raised on open land, but it is a very small percent compared to feed lots.
But of course, you will never hear this argument from "environmental activists,"
I am an environmentalist (I think you are kind of suicidal if you are not concerned about sustainable practices... but I digress), and I'm all for deep ocean floating wind farms providing electricity and water.
Someone ran the numbers in a prior post. If you used 10% of the total wind farm energy it would produce only 3% of the L.A.Basin water use. If you wanted to get serious about desalination it would require massive investments in wind and solar farms. And as an environmentalist, I am always in favor of massive investments in green energy:)
" And as an environmentalist, I am always in favor of massive investments in green energy"
So please, for the sake of us all on the coast and inland, try to talk other greens into supporting carbon-free energy projects.
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
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/la...
No. You can't look at my Sig; it's mine, and I'm not showing you.
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.