Hacker News Reader

Comment by goda90 | Hacker News Reader

I think an important thing to look at when considering water usage of a particular food, is the nature of where the food is being produced. Almonds are largely grown in California, where the aquifers are shrinking, and evaporation can take the water much further away. Meanwhile, dairy cows and their food can be raised in lots of climates, including in water-rich places like Wisconsin.

Used water makes it back into the global water cycle someplace. The concern is when we deplete a local water cycle or destroy habitats in our use of it.

View on HN

Comparing almond water consumption to cattle water consumption is irresponsible, raising cattle takes orders of magnitude more resources. And California also has a huge cattle industry…

>"Comparing almond water consumption to cattle water consumption is irresponsible, raising cattle takes orders of magnitude more resources."

You say it's irresponsible to compare the two, then immediately proceed to do it!

Perhaps you meant to say that it was irresponsible to imply they were similar? In any case, rational decision-making requires comparing options, and reactions of disgust are generally unproductive, both for thinking and for debating.

is saying a comparison is irresponsible the same as disgust? is every comparison valid? what's more unproductive, pure pedantry, or disagreeing and then sharing information? who is really showing disgust?

"comparison of almond water consumption vs. cattle water consumption for the purposes of justifying the elimination of one or the other is irresponsible, because their impact on the environment (and in fact, the California water supply) is incomparable, and seriously comparing the two after realising this fact would mean that you are misunderstanding the statistics or purposefully telling half-truths. The only responsible version of this argument, one that seeks to limit the impact of agriculture on the water supplies of states like California, would be one that proposes that we need to reduce or eliminate or severely reduce both."

hope this more pedantically phrased version helps :)

What resources are used by cattle in Northern Europe? Just go visit Normandy, oh and btw don't forget to bring an umbrella, to witness all the missing water that happens to be falling from the sky.

> What resources are used by cattle in Northern Europe? .. oh and btw don't forget to bring an umbrella, to witness all the missing water that happens to be falling from the sky.

In the UK, the resources include soya-based animal feeds imported from Brazil [0]. Cattle cannot live by rainfall alone.

[0] https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/challenges/soya/

> Cattle cannot live by rainfall alone.

Of course they can, as long as you don't have too much of them. Animals in the wild live on rainwater alone just fine.

Also Normandy isn't in the UK, it's in France. Different countries have different practices around animals.

They also require something to feed on, like grass. Water has next to no nutrients or energy.

By "on rainfall alone", I meant "with no exterior food production". Of course you need land on which grass can grow and sunlight.

That's just nonsense. There is absolutely no need for UK cattle to be fed soya-based feeds and if finishing lots have recently started using them, it's for a minor percentage increase which might be financially worthwhile but certainly isn't a requirement.

does the u.k. have different standards on grassfed certification? in the u.s. grassfed !== grass finished unfortunately

As far as I am aware there isn't a certification. Because Generally speaking UK are all Grass Fed since there are no cheap source of Grain. And these type of word play are generally allowed in Food Label.

Do they grow almonds in Northern Europe? Also, Cattle in Northern Europe are not cattle in California.

These two places are not comparable.

Cattle production in the U.S. is not comparable to other countries.

Why not?

Scale, I suspect.

Cattle production in the US is something like 20% greater than Brazil, the next highest producer according to the first source[1] I found, producing literally 1/5 of the world's total beef.

There's piles more data out there, and probably a lot more to say, but this is probably the answer to a first approximation.

1: https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-production-ranking-co...

>Cattle production in the US is something like 20% greater than Brazil, the next highest producer according to the first source[1] I found, producing literally 1/5 of the world's total beef.

That's not really surprising when US has 2.26x the arable land of brazil. If you normalize for that, brazil is actually 84% more intensive than the US. The European union is even more intensive.

what does "intensive" mean, and what does arable land have to do with cattle production?

I think you're missing the point. GP claims that since the US is the top producer in the world, it's somehow different from the other countries because of "scale". That doesn't make any sense because it doesn't account for land use. Suppose there are 3 equally sized countries (A, B and C), with identical geography and livestock raising practices. Suppose A and B decided to form a union (eg. united AB or AB union). Now you can say AB union has twice the "scale" of C, and therefore you can't compare the production between AB and C. This is despite that in actuality the situation in all 3 countries are identical, "scale" doesn't have anything to do with it, and the the increased "scale" is basically due to arbitrary categorization. Normalizing livestock by arable land attempts to normalize this, since available land does have a material impact on how livestock would be raised.

The United States and China are the dominant producers and consumers of meat. And even between these two countries, apples to apples comparisons are not helpful as production practices are not the same.

>apples to apples comparisons are not helpful as production practices are not the same.

How are the production practices different? How do the differences relate to resource usage?

the differences are too many to put succinctly, they're (IMO) way behind in standards on every level as a result of exponential growth in meat consumption that is practically unprecedented. I'd start here: https://sci-hub.se/10.1126/sciadv.aar8534