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Comment by Brendinooo | Hacker News Reader

Usually when people compare data center water usage to golf course water usage I feel a lot better about the whole thing.

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Compare it to alfalfa and you’ll be laughing your ass off at how much water alfalfa consumes.

~340 acres of alfalfa in California growing year round uses as much water as Google’s data center in The Dalles uses in one year.

That data center used 550M gallons for evaporative cooling in 2025, which is 1687 acre-feet of water.

One acre of alfalfa in California uses ~5 acre-feet of water per acre of alfalfa per year. There are around a million acres of alfalfa grown in California, or 5 million acre-feet of water per year on alfalfa. Which is used to feed cows.

Feed cows in places without the water and sun to grow this stuff locally. Which is tantamount to exporting water from the American West which will eventually be turned into a desert. We effectively can't be trusted to govern our natural resources more than 5 years out.

California’s alfalfa is primarily for export.

Would it surprise you to find out that there are many people who are opposed to golf courses for the same reasons?

It would not!

I’d recommend you read the following report: Proximity to Golf Courses and Risk of Parkinson Disease

Individuals living within water service areas with a golf course had nearly double the odds of PD compared with individuals in water service areas without golf courses…

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

Did you read the paper carefully? It's about pesticide use. (It's not especially plausible as epidemiological studies go, though I'm unsurprised if a better study finds a firmer correlation between pesticides and PD.)

Did you not read that the effect was directly tied to “Individuals living within water service areas” in my original comment? Yeah no shit it’s pesticides. They’re seeping into the water supply from the golf course runoff.

Datacenters expel water filled with all kinds of heavy metals and other kinds of toxic sludge. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/sustainability/4-strateg...

It should be pretty obvious the parallel I’m drawing here. Where’d you get your epidemiology PhD?

It is in fact not obvious what parallel you're drawing here. What parts of this study do you find especially credible, methodologically?

Where did you get your PHD?

That play works if you are in fact a PhD in a related field, but not if we're both reading the same study as laypersons and disputing its relevance and reliability.

What I suspect happened here is that you found this study by Googling for it, and forgot that it is in fact very easy to get a capsule summary of any published study posted on HN.

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