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Comment by wwweston | Hacker News Reader

From what I've heard, a lot of CA rice is grown around the Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta, in areas the water table is so high farmers turn pumps off to water crops.

Also, keep in mind that while rice can use a lot of water (600 gallons or so to produce a pound of rice), it's small fry to beef, which is an order of magnitude more. Or if you want another beloved non-meat product for comparison, an equivalent weight in wine probably uses on the same order as rice (significantly more for less careful wineries, somewhat less for efficient ones).

Not that I'm against the state taking a hard look at all agricultural, industrial, and residential water use. Just not sure we should be picking on rice in particular...

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All good points, but remember, they're still significantly less value-dense uses of water than things we're being hounded to stop.

For example, how much is it worth to me to blow 50 gallons of water in a shower. Maybe 5 cents at least? That water is valued at .1 cents per gallon.

In contrast, a pound of beef at the ranch costs maybe a dollar. 100 cents to 5000 gallons of water makes it valued at .02 cents per gallon at most (because it has other inputs).

The rancher should still cut back way before showers.

Why are you comparing the cost of the water to your house with the cost of beef at the source? You sure as hell aren't paying $1/lb for beef, and remember that the water you're using in your shower has to be transported and treated before it can be re-used; it's not evaporating off your bathroom floor.

This seems like a really odd way to make a comparison, even if we accept that the value to you of a shower and a meal are roughly the same.

A few things:

1) I was conservatively assuming that the cost of the meat is due entirely to the cost of the water. In reality, it's even less. Taking the value of meat-in-the-city would make the estimate err even further in the wrong direction by attributing, to water, value that was actually added by transportation.

2) For city dwellers, I wasn't using the actual cost paid for the water, but the (approximate, much-higher) amount they would way if push came to shove, in order to estimate the relative utility destroyed by people cutting back on showers compared to farmers producing less water-intense output, and thus how misguided are the campaigns to get people to cut back what are already high-value uses of water.

The numbers around water "used" for beef are a bit disingenuous. It's counting water used to grow the feed - but feed is relatively easy to transport and can be grow in water-rich areas.

Why is the including all the water inputs for beef disingenuous?

Because people like eating meat and the fact that eating meat is like driving an SUV causes some cognitive dissonance in people who consider themselves socially conscious.

Because beef feed is the most water efficient crop that can be grown in many areas. Cattle have four stomachs, they are very efficient at turning grass and similar crops into calories. They are inefficient at turning energy dense foods such as grains into calories.

In other words, if the most environmentally friendly crop for an area cannot be eaten directly by humans, the most environmentally friendly thing may be to use cattle to turn them into calories that can be eaten by humans.

A large portion of North America used to be grassland fed upon by Bison. Range cattle have a very similar ecological footprint to Bison. By that measure, they are much more "natural" than any other food (except perhaps bison or mastodon). Pasture and hay land is rarely/never a monoculture, it is rarely/never sprayed with chemical. (Which is much more environmentally friendly than the organic alternative, plowing). It's also rarely irrigated. You're much more likely to find wild life on pasture and hay land.

How much beef in the US is free range and grass fed? I'm betting a very very small amount of the whole.

As far as I'm aware, most beef cattle in North America is free range and grain finished. In other words, they eat hay (or their mother does) for most of their lives and are only fed grain for a couple of months before being slaughtered or on especially cold winter days.

It mostly depends on the relative prices of corn and beef. Corn is heavily subsidized in the States, so an unnatural amount of it is fed to cattle.

Best data I could dig up

>Most of the farms with livestock were farms with pastured livestock types and few other livestock, represented by 707,365 farms (54 percent). Farms with few livestock numbered 361,031 (27 percent), farms with confined livestock types numbered 237,821 (18 percent), and farms with specialty livestock types numbered 8,834 (0.7 percent).

>Overall, farms with pastured livestock types and few other livestock accounted for only 17 percent of all livestock sales

Of course, farms w/ confined cattle may raise free-range cattle as well.

>Farms with confined livestock types accounted for 99 percent or more of all animal units on all farms with livestock for each of fattened cattle, milk cows, other dairy cattle,11 swine, chickens, and turkeys

From skimming. This actually has some pretty interesting data, prolly warrants a more serious look.

www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/national/technical/?cid=nrcs143_014121

Yep. Cattle just don't do well, long term, on grain. It acidifies the stomach(s) which they're not equipped to handle. All cattle in the US is grass fed for the first 2/3 of its life, then moved to grain for most. Mine eat grain as a treat, it's like candy to them. But the primary source of their food is grass. Grass that I would be mowing otherwise (well, my wife - I'm allergic).

A lot of the rice is actually grown using water from lakes Oroville and Shasta. I grew up in the area, and places like Marysville (south of Oroville) and Colusa don't really grow anything but rice.

Interesting -- so do they flood there? That'd seem to be a questionable use in my book...

Yeah, all of the rice fields are currently flooded. They won't be for much longer, it's almost harvest time.

Despite getting water from the reservoirs, most ranches have had their allotments restricted to the point that they have to use well water to maintain their crops. A lot of the ranches have been forced to drill deeper and deeper wells. I know of a few ranches that are pretty much in competition with their neighbors to go deeper- one ranch drills under the other, and is then draining the aquifer out from under people with shallower wells. Most drilling companies are booked solid for the next year due to demand.

It's scary driving through the valley and seeing drill rigs everywhere, it really drives home how serious the situation is. I wouldn't want to be someone that lives off of well water, chances are their wells are going to go dry before the end of this, and it's crazy expensive to go deeper, plus the scheduling issues. What would you do if your well ran dry but it's $50000 and six months before you could do anything about it?

The beef statistic is often cited on HN, but isn't particularly relevant to the issue.

Perhaps we should be questioning making the California desert the vegetable basket of the US, at least on a year round basis.

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