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Comment by taejavu | Hacker News Reader

How many gallons of water are you assuming are in that burger patty? Because, while cows do drink water that falls from the sky and lands on fields where it was going to land anyway, they also urinate most of it back out.

Very little water that would have been used for any other purpose, or isn’t naturally returned to the water cycle, ends up being consumed in the production of the burger patty.

To be clear I think your point about AI not consuming all that much water relative to other things is valid, but comparing it to the water consumed by eating meat weakens your point for anyone that hasn’t bought into the bunk “cows are driving climate change” narrative.

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Cows drinking isn't the major pie anyways. Cow feeding on Alfalfa which has been grown and irrigated with huge amount of water is the problem.

The vast majority of cattle are raised in a pasture and eat grass, even those labeled “grain fed”. Grain fed just means they spend some time (e.g. 30 days) in a feed lot.

I hadn’t heard about cows eating alfalfa though, where is that happening? Wouldn’t it be more valuable to sell it to people instead of using it as feed?

Grass takes lots of water to grow.

That water is free. It’s called rain.

So when there is no rain you let the cattle die? Feed on other people's land? By that logic even server's water can come from rain.

> Around 14 percent of the 3 670 km3 of freshwater withdrawn each year for the irrigation of crops and pasture is allocated to produce feed items for livestock

[1]: https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/a7f...

Yes, drought often results in the death of livestock.

That largely depends on where the alfalfa is grown. A lot of the alfalfa grown in deserts is shipped as combination ballast weight for leaving cargo ships and to feed foreign cows and not used for domestic cattle. While nobody around or east of the Great Lakes irrigates alfalfa and is essentially a free product requiring no pesticides and no fertilizer and even adds extra nitrogen fertilizer to the soil. It is just plant, cut, and bail and is otherwise basically a wonder crop for sustainable agriculture anywhere that gets rain once a month or more.

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