Hacker News Reader

Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

Well, cutting off water subsidies for the meat industrial complex would be a very good start to mitigate water shortage problems.

If people want to eat meat, they should pay for water costs. A pound of steak requires 4000 to 6000 gallons of water.

I enjoy occasionally eating beef, but also realize the environmental hit.

View on HN

> A pound of steak requires 4000 to 6000 gallons of water.

People keep throwing this number around but it's at best voluntarily missleading, if not straight up a lie.

4 to 6k gallons is roughly what a meat cow (slaughtered at 18 months of age) will use in its lifetime (which btw if a lot less than the average westerner in the same time span). To stretch it to "4 to 6k gallons per pound of beef" you have to include the rain that watered its pasture, which makes absolutely no sense. Nobody ever tells that a bread loaf requires 500L of water to produce (roughly the quantity of water needed to water 1 bread loaf worth of wheat) because this water falls for free from the sky anyway.

Now you can make intricate arguments about how if there were other types of ecosystems in place of pastures more water could be retained in the soil and would eventually make its way to aquafiers or rivers -which is true- but I'm confident this isn't how people interpret this number. The goal of people who provide this number without any context is to give the impression that eating a pound of beef is equivalent to letting the faucet open for 4k+ gallons worth of water, which it absolutely isn't.

Also fun fact, a cow does not yield a single stake, if I recall correctly a cow yields 30-40% of it's weight. Given a stake is 250 grams and a cow weights over 300kgs that's about 400 "steaks" (a cow yields a lot of cuts not just steaks) per cow. So that's about 10 to 15 gallons of water per "steak".

I just did a web search: the results seem to be in the range 1800 t 2400 gallons per pound of beef produced.

Were did you get your numbers from?

> To stretch it to "4 to 6k gallons per pound of beef" you have to include the rain that watered its pasture, which makes absolutely no sense. Nobody ever tells that a bread loaf requires 500L of water to produce (roughly the quantity of water needed to water 1 bread loaf worth of wheat) because this water falls for free from the sky anyway.

Not in the west, it doesn't. The water for the pasture (or the alfalfa for the feed lot), and the water to grow the wheat, are often pumped from an aquifer. And some of the more important aquifers are shrinking.

But the overall point is a valid one. I note that 500L of water is about 125 gallons. Per loaf of bread.

> Not in the west, it doesn't.

(edit: just realised that maybe you meant the west of the USA and not the western world in general, in this case you might be right I'm obviously not aware of local practices from the other side of the world)

It does, I absolutely hate using authoritative argument but my family raises cattle and I've never seen a watered pasture in my life. I wonder what's the background of people teaching me online "how things really are".

In bad years when it doesn't rain enough for grass to grow, people get rid of the animals they can't afford to feed. There's no system in place to water the pastures and "save the harvest".

If you buy cheap, low quality meat from animals that never grazed and are fed grain and silage all year round then yes these feed crops would probably have been watered at some point (but even then, not 100% of the water comes from irigation). The broad avilability of meat grown in miserable conditions is a problem as well but not the one I'm talking about.

Yes, I meant the west of the USA. West of the 100th Meridian, you're west of the western edge of the Gulf of Mexico, and therefore you get significantly less rain.

You can see this when you're driving. If you drive west on I-70, the trees stop about 20 miles west of Salina Kansas. On I-80 you're close to the Platte River so it's not quite as stark.

Attacking peoples' food preference is a red herring and is just a way for vegans to feel morally superior. Everyone could go vegan in the US tomorrow and it would only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a few percentage points. Go after overall food waste instead. We throw away something like 40% of food produced.

Also, let's question why people need to live in such an inhospitable climate such as the desert.

and food waste doesn’t mean the groceries you bought and forgot about in the fridge. if everyone perfectly ate all the food they bought form the store it would make a small dent in overall food waste. businesses are the primary source of wasted food.

we have subsidized desert living. it’s cheaper to live in the desert and run your ac all day and keep your pool full than to live somewhere with less environmental challenges

Let's question why people need to grow food in such an inhospitable climate as the desert.

I'm not sure that the area that's affected by this drought has a large amount of ranching activity. I'll just speak for Nevada, but the state is very unhospitable for ranching activities because it's pretty much a desert.

Not necessarily from the Colorado River, but at least in California a great deal of state and federal water project deliveries are used for alfalfa, all of which is animal feed. According to some sources animal feed consumes half of the water in the state.

https://www.comstocksmag.com/web-only/livestock-production-d...

That is a very misleading claim. Cattle are raised in arid climates where there isn't enough water to grow water intensive food crops, so that the cattle can eat scrub and other vegetation inedible to humans. Basically cattle are machines for turning grass which doesn't require a lot of rainwater into protein, which is why cattle cultures arose in deserts and other dry climates while things like rice-based cultures arose in wet climates.

We need more, not less, cattle in arid climates and it is pretty irresponsible/wasteful to adopt vegetarian based diets in arid climates. But it should be grass-fed cattle.

Many of those dry areas could not sustain a larger population of cattle/goats/etc. They are already having trouble with the current population. In most cases, cattle need additional water to survive in the drier areas.

Half of the US is an arid climate which can and has historically sustained hundreds of millions of Buffalo and other cattle. The reason farmers use corn and require irrigation to concentrate herds in one place is not because there is no water but because the beef tastes better and can be raised more cheaply than with less water intensive mechanisms.

"A pound of steak requires 4000 to 6000 gallons of water."

This statistic is incredibly inaccurate and has been weaponized. Where do you think the water goes when all is said and done?

Rangeland leases are another discussion. I would agree that those are a massive subsidy. Every aspect of our food supply chain is heavily subsidized.

Leaving aside the reliability of the 4000 gal/lb for meat, it take 10,000 litres per kg to make almonds (a major californian crop, 2000gallons to the pound? I can't make these weird units work! ). I wonder how many hogsheads of almond milk you get per shackle of almonds?

So why pick on meat? Why not stop subsidising all water users?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1470160X1...

Well, all water users should not be subsidized. What is wrong with letting the free market set the cost of beef, almonds, rice, etc. based on water costs?

Well generally we don't like food prices going up and farmers going out of business (since farming isn't sustainable without huge subsidies and since rural areas get lot more political representation).

But broadly I agree.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com