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Comment by BetterGeiger | Hacker News Reader

Most water use is for agriculture. Most agricultural water use is for meat. Beef is by far the least efficient way to turn water (and other stuff) into protein. I propose we tax meat nationwide according to its water use, instead of dreaming up unrealistic and unnecessary megaprojects.

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I know you said protein, but calories are really the metric we want to use here.

TL;DR: 2.1 calories/gallon for almonds, 5.3 c/g for tofu, 1,558 c/g for beef.

Almonds consume 3.2 gallons of water each for just shy of 7 calories. 2.18 calories per gallon.

Cows consume ~3,200 gallons of water from birth to slaughter, where they produce about 6 million calories. 1,875 calories per gallon.

An additional 50 bales of hay to feed it over its lifetime (really hay is half the diet but its late and I'm just doubling it). Approximately 1,300 gallons per acre, which produces 100 bales - 13 gallons per bale - 650 gallons to grow the food. That is still 1,558 calories per gallon of water.

I found a recipe online that used about a gallon of water (rinsing and as an ingredient) for 1 pound of tofu. 10,000 gallons to produce one bushel (or 60 pounds) of soybeans. 166 gallons per pound. A pound is 2.6 cups, recipe wants 1 cup. 63 gallons per cup. 64 gallons made into tofu. 344 calories per pound of tofu. 5.3 calories per gallon of water consumed.

Your numbers for beef are absurdly wrong. Reality is closer to 2000 gallons per pound, or roughly 0.5 calories per gallon. Chicken is about 4x less. Grains are roughly an order of magnitude less. As a country the USA consumes dramatically more meat than necessary, cutting even a little would have a massive impact on water consumption.

What are your sources for the cow info? I'm getting more like 30 kcal/gallon.

A cow drinks 9-12 gallons per day [1] (assuming not lactating, which takes a lot more water; let's just say these are cows being raised purely for slaughter). Call it 10 gallons/day on average.

Cows raised for slaughter live 4-6 years [2]. Call it 5 years on average.

10 gallons/day * 355 days/year * 5 years/cow ≈ 17750 gallons/cow.

Finally, the amount of energy in a cow as sold in retail stores is about 500,000 kcal [3]. That works out to about 30 kcal/gallon.

[1] https://www.amelicor.com/blog/how-much-water-should-a-cow-dr...

[2] https://thehumaneleague.org/article/dairy-cows

[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/theydidthemonstermath/comments/a8ha...

> What are your sources for the cow info?

Having raised cows and some Googling. Your numbers are for dairy cows and not meat cows. Dairy cows consume a ton of water because they are intended to produce a liquid nearly non-stop, and while they are eventually slaughtered for meat it mostly ends up in dog food.

So you're basically just making stuff up. http://extension.msstate.edu/publications/publications/beef-...

Meant to say 365 days/year.

Are you intentionally lying?

This is a great idea. People need to connect all the big problems with animal husbandry to their immediate lives so they have impetus to stop eating meat. Most people have virtually no knowledge of how bad meat really is. They just see a product on the shelf that they strongly desire.

Im sure people will react reasonably when a state subsidized luxury good for everyone reveals its reall price over night.

Why do people make these kinds of objections?

Taper down the subsidies over time rather than implementing them over night.

"If we intentionally implement this policy change in the dumbest, bluntest way possible, it will be disruptive" is an argument for never making any policy change.

So people would just stop eating meat and that's the end of it? Or might it be that you'd then "activate" a sizable chunk of 92%+ of Americans who eat meat to vote for the next candidate who runs on a pro-meat platform. That's a sizable enough influence that the next election would likely look like one big beef industry commercial.

If being vegetarian or vegan is an important value to you then the real way to make real lasting progress is by trying to persuade and convince people, not by trying to force or otherwise coerce them into agreeing with you. The same as on any topic.

The point of my comment is that people need to be convinced. I obviously wasn't explicit enough based on the responses.

Like abortion right? Haha!

This is backwards. Most people don't appreciate how important hoofed animals are for the ecology and how efficient they are in terms of caloric production. There are some issues with mass industrial animal husbandry as currently practiced, but if you want long-term sustainability, the mass industrial farming of the Midwest with soybeans and corn has to stop and be replaced with bison or cattle grazing before soil depletion is too far advanced.

Trying to end meat consumption is going to result in a Great Leap Forward-type disaster. We need to be looking at the ecology holistically and try to work with nature and the sustainable processes that generated what we have now, not burn it all down we can grow more of what's short-term efficient on spreadsheets for one single dimension.

If you want go to this route, then you might find the cost of your cereal going up. More than 98% [1] of the water usage attributed to beef/cattle (and other animals) is an indirect measurement - it's from the estimated water usage in the production of the feed that's given to them. Cattle themselves directly use next to no water. So you'd need to add your water tax to grains and other such products.

Another interesting datum is that the average head of cattle has a water footprint of 2056 (m^3/year), while it's 2842 [2] for the average American, and 1071 for the average Chinese. There are 94 million cattle in the US, and 332 million people.

[1] - https://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product-water-...

[2] - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221830102_The_Water...

how much cereal does the average person eat vs the average cow?

Yes most of the water use to produce beef is indirect, in growing the feed. If beef is taxed to consumers it will reduce demand, which will reduce the demand for feed, which will reduce the consumption of water. Decreasing the demand for cereal will decrease its cost, not increase it.

You're somewhat shifting the goal posts here. The OP was suggesting taxing meat in proportion to their water usage, which would then presumably be spent on water reclamation projects or whatever. But the direct water usage of meat is completely negligible, which leaves you in this weird scenario where you're trying to tax somebody for water that they didn't use. So you're left to tax water usage at the source, and that's going to hit plants far harder than meat.

My understanding is that agricultural water use in CA is dominated by growing crops, not feeding cows.

Crops that feed animals lol

Cows are actually extremely efficient at turning water into calories. Almonds, alfalfa, and soy consume 2.5 orders of magnitude more water to generate an equivalent amount of calories as a cow.

Source?

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