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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

+1, even though I slightly disagree with you. I live in the mountains of Central Arizona, BTW.

Harvesting rain water, storing it, and using it for a home garden can't hurt, it is good exercise, saves some money on groceries, and provides an emergency supply in case municipal water servers ever go offline for a while.

The "meat addicts of Hacker News" have downvoted me in the past for mentioning this, but I think it bears repeating: changing dietary habits to only eat meat a few times a week does a lot to help with water shortages, reduce green house gases, and with energy conservation. There is also nutrition literature posted by a medical doctor I follow on Twitter that indicates that reducing meat consumption helps with several health issues and potentially increases longevity.

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Former Arizona resident here. The solution is simple: stop subsidizing water. It's completely insane that you have cattle ranchers and cotton farms in a nearly Martian landscape. It'd be economically unviable if it weren't for massive water subsidies, so it should be.

+1 I agree. I would extend this to all farming and meat production, even in non-arid areas.

I read Peter Zeihan's pretty good book "THE END OF THE WORLD IS JUST THE BEGINNING, Mapping the Collapse of Globalization" and he offers lots of good advice for sustaining the human population: optimize on foods like wheat that provide protein and carbs, using fewer resources like water. Peter has lots of equivalent YouTube content if you don't want to buy the book.

I'll offer a hat tip to our little bubble here. Water consumption with respect to the animals themselves is high but once you factor in all of the water used in the production of the feed itself it's crazy especially when considering the subsidies in play.

I'll also say I thoroughly enjoyed Zeihan's book. It was enlightening from many angles but the supply chain dependencies and raw material overviews he did were very informative.

> Water consumption with respect to the animals themselves is high but once you factor in all of the water used in the production of the feed itself it's crazy especially when considering the subsidies in play.

Animals are properly used to upcycle calories which humans can’t consume. Ideally the heavy lifting would be done by bugs, egg chickens and dairy cows.

Subsidies were initiated by politicians who didn’t understand the problem they were trying to solve.

My family went through reducing our meat intake to a few days, and honestly - it kinda sucked, since it reduced many of our meal options, since they "had" to be vegetarian.

After about twelve months of this and getting sick of it, we settled on meals that usually have meat, but using less of it. For example; Pad Thai usually calls for mostly animal protein + noodles + tofu, so we usually pad it out with lots more vegetables, which is healthier anyway.

This is pretty reasonable, and what we've been doing, though for different reasons. For example, a single chicken breast is plenty to make something like Pad Thai for a family of 4. Get creative!

The meat water usage is often greatly exaggerated.

For example, quite a lot of meat and feed for meat production is produced in Iowa where there is virtually zero irrigation and the water table comes up to the surface and not only do we not conserve water, we put down grids of porous pipes in the ground to drain rainwater faster.

No water shortages are affected by this at all, you southwest state people aren’t downstream.

There aren’t water shortages everywhere. Plenty of places it rains quite enough.

This is false.

77% of all water use in the US southwest (not Iowa) is for agriculture. 32% of all water use in the US southwest is used on alfafa, corn silage and grass hay, specifically for beef production, grown here, in the US southwest.

This can help clear up misunderstandings:

https://www.vox.com/23373495/western-us-water-scarcity-droug...

The drought under discussion in in the US southwest, not Iowa, not New England, not the Great Lakes. It makes no difference if those other areas have more or less water, since there are no connections to the "great basin" (the drainage area of the Colorado and Rio Grande) from outside,

Iowa is east of the 100th meridian, traditionally the line where irrigation is not technically required for agricltural production (though it may still be used). The drought under discussion is west of that line, and agricultural production is generally impossible there without irrigation.

Much of that alfalfa is, quite stupidly, for export.

What I'm saying is all meat is not equal, and quite a lot of it is produced in places where water isn't an issue. Many places simply should not produce certain agricultural products, go fight for that instead of telling people their food choices are immoral. California and other southwest states stupidly setting agricultural policy for this kind of wasteful water usage are problems with those states and their governance, not people who like to eat cheeseburgers.

>not technically required for agricltural production

Is in many places entirely unused.

Not only the alfalfa. Most of the beef raised on the non-exported cattle feed is in turn exported itself.

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