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Comment by tkyjonathan | Hacker News Reader

"thirsty grains like rice and wheat".. Yet again no mention of animal agriculture. How much water a day does a cow need Vs wheat?

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Producing a pound of beef requires 2,000 gallons, vs 138 gallons for a pound of wheat: http://www.gracelinks.org/blog/1143/beef-the-king-of-the-big...

I see numbers from 441 to ~12,000 gallons that does not inspire confidence in the estimation methods.

No doubt beef requires much more water than wheat but let's not oversimplify.

The cow also walks to the water, the wheat, not so much. Plus, milk.

Does wheat produce a sugar laden liquid that can be replenished by the cow every few days that is macrobiotic as all get out?

And yes, I know about beer.

It's not clear to me that such numbers are meaningful, because most of that water does not stay in the cow. It is just temporarily in the cow, and should eventually become available for other uses.

And more widely, much more crops are used as animal feed vs human consumption. We have no food shortage, just a high demand for luxury (meat) foods that competes with basic sustenance.

The solution in a first world economy is not to limit options. That is just regression.

The solution is to make the industrial system sustainable.

If there was a power crisis, you wouldn't make everyone use pocket calculators instead of computers, you'd figure out how power generation alternatives.

Or price things so that they take in all their externalities... perhaps cheap meat isn't ethical.

That analogy isn't great -- plenty of places in the world have power crises, and they do respond by limiting consumption of power.

In actual water crises, such as the one in California, limiting and controlling consumption is the response. Obviously, it's always better to come up with an alternative before you reach the crisis. But once you've gotten to the crisis, you're already exhausted all other options and have to be realistic.

>plenty of places in the world have power crises, and they do respond by limiting consumption of power.

At the cost of luxury, economic development and social stability.

It's an emergency option, not a sustainable one.

New generation and leaps and conservation technology allow for the same options while improving future sustainability.

Actually, conservation is likely much lower hanging fruit than new generation -- both for water and energy. It's just that the American market somehow thinks "conservation" equals "limiting and red tape" when it really means "making sure you can keep producing/consuming."

I'd say the addiction is more about sourcing food where the government subsidizes the cost.

The east coast has no water issues compared to the west, yet farmland is fallow everywhere.

But I can raise cattle on land that wont grow wheat. I say this as someone that grew up near the Idaho Rockies. The land is incredibly rocky, seemingly barren looking, and EXTREMELY plow unfriendly. But cattle graze without a problem.

Now, as for the giant feed lots that you probably think all cattle are raised in, those are a thing. But so are open range cattle.

Same goes for sheep and goats. I think it's an important factor in land use calculation that's often ignored.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/opinion/meat-makes-the-...

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