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Comment by marricks | Hacker News Reader

65 pointsmarricks93 comments

Bringing this back from a previous comment. Normalizing the "how many gallons does it take" for different foods into Calories per Gallon (items towards the top are more water-efficient):

  Watermelon......... 8.2 cal/gal
  Almond............. 7.0
  Head of broccoli... 5.9
  Cantaloupe......... 3.7
  Corn cob........... 1.5
  Beef............... 0.2

Source: USDA

"USDA" isn't a source. A URL to a document (or a document citation with titles and authors) is a source. I'd like to read that document; do you happen to know the real source?

Calories for all food taken from here: http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/search/list?

Water consumption for everything but beef taken from here: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-gleason-almond-fa...

> for everything but beef

But it's the number for beef that is contentious. That's the whole point of your comment. And, unlike the others, it wasn't included when you made this comment last time.

The number for beef is in the OP article...

Yes, but depending on the beef cut you work from, the kcal/gal number varies from yours to over 1.0.

FWIW: the same exercise comes up with a comparably terrible efficiency rating for rice.

Leanest cut of beef (eye of round) is 526cal/lb http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/7398?man=&lfacet=&cou...

Fattiest beef I could find (70/30 ground) is 1501cal/lb http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/3960?man=&lfacet=&cou...

Using 4000gal/lb, this gives us a range for beef of 0.13-0.38cal/gal. To get to 1.0 you'd have to be using pure tallow

Well, hold on. I don't think the condescension is warranted given that the idea of a "source" refers to attributing where some piece of information comes from. Consider Wikipedia's policy of verifiability, that requires all pages' material to be verifiable, but not necessarily cited. If you are interested enough, just try to find those USDA numbers online!

Very true. I just like when sources are linked by URL so it is verifiable by another user.

USDA is US Department of Agriculture, which I hope we can accept as a neutral commentator on such matters. This is indeed a source, though not a citation.

How sure are you about the gallons/pound stats you're working from? I'm getting wildly different numbers from different sources; I wonder if they're playing with different definitions of "pound" --- for instance, by substituting "beef cuts commonly used for hamburgers" for "beef".

(Beef is indisputably inefficient, of course).

Slightly later

I'm finding it pretty difficult to come up with a credible number for (say) pork. It's easy to find estimates of gallons/lb of pork, but the kcal of different preparations of meat vary wildly, and the gallons/lb may represent all those different cuts (so you'd need % breakdown of all the parts/kcal per animal), or worse, the gal/lb numbers could just based on some representative cut from the animal.

I suspect the variance in the gallons/pound numbers is due to attribution. Water fed to cows counts. Water fed to alfalfa fed to cows counts. Does water fed to farmers who farm alfalfa fed to cows count? What if my cow eats corn, not alfalfa? What if my cow grazes open pasture? Does water spent producing petroleum to freight beef count?

How about the dairy from milk cow? Does that matter for these types of stats?

Did a quick google search, and if the cow produced 2500gal of milk per year for 5 years before becoming meat, and the cow produced about 400lb of meat, then you end up with 1lb of beef + 30 gallons of milk for the amount of water the article states.

My understanding is that dairy cows and beef cows are different breeds, and that dairy cow meat is not normally sold as beef. Is that not the case?

Last I heard dairy cows are butchered for low grade meat. They won't be in your top sirloin but maybe in your ground beef.

The livestock industry does its best to use everything.

Dairy cows produce milk to feed their you g. This, dairy cows are continuously bred through their lives. The female calves go on to be dairy cows. The male calves go on to be veal or low grade meat or animal food.

Once the dairy cow has finished being a dairy cow they're sold off as low grade meat.

I like where your head is at, but I'm not sure how a cow that only consumes 3000-5000 gallons of water in its lifetime could possibly produce 2500 gallons of milk (85% water) every year for five years.

It is 3000-5000 gallons of water per a pound of beef. A cow weighs probably a ton.

Can you explain how you got that 7.0 for almonds? I'm getting a much, much lower number; not as bad as beef, of course, but worse than corn.

Are you using waterfootprint.org's "ground nuts in shell" as a proxy for almonds?

In 2010, melons, squash, and cucumbers combined accounted for 10% of the irrigated crop area of almonds and pistachios in California.

Source: California Department of Water Resources http://www.water.ca.gov/landwateruse/anaglwu.cfm

Further, per the same source, over twice as much water is applied to each acre of almonds and pistachios as each acre of melons, squash, and cucumbers.

What I've found so far for beef statistics doesn't make a lot of sense to me. For instance, California has the 4th largest cattle population in the U.S. (half of Texas' beef population), but is not in the top 10 beef producers. California is the top dairy producer, but it appears that only ~34% of the cattle population is dairy cattle. Further, it appears that chicken has been the meat of choice for the U.S. since the late 1990s.

Source: National Cattlemen's Beef Association: http://www.beefusa.org/CMDocs/BeefUSA/Producer%20Ed/Directio...

e: I read cal/gal as gal/cal and was completely off base. Apologies.

OP article itself says 3000-5000gal/lb. I split the difference and used 4000. The USDA says 1lb of 85/15 ground beef has 975cal/lb: http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/7554?man=&lfacet=&cou...

Thanks! I have been wanting to do that calculation myself.

Am I reading this right: for 1 gal of water, we get 8.2 calories from Watermelon, 7 from Almonds (&etc.) and .. 0.2 calories, per gallon of water, from Beef?

Okay, but we already know that we can't just subsist on Watermelons. Like, you need protein and things.

Have some almonds.

In case anyone isnt getting the sarcasm in the title, quote from the article:

>Since I happened to have a pound of almonds in the refrigerator I decided to count up those little water suckers and see how much water it takes to produce a pound of almonds. It was bad. Four hundred and thirty-three gallons of water.

>Four hundred and thirty-three? Wait a minute. How about a pound of beef? (I dare say it’s a lot easier to eat a pound of beef than it is to eat a pound of almonds.) According to the folks at waterfootprint.org it takes between 3,000 and 5,000 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef.

Ruefully commenting on a story I also flagged, but: chicken takes less water per pound than almonds. Depending on which source you believe, so does pork.

A pound of beef is about half as calorically dense as a pound of almonds, but a half gallon of almond milk also takes a whole pound of almonds, so you have to take into consideration the different ways they're eaten.

What about the water cycle? "Using" water doesn't mean "using it up" – if you water a field from a well, some portion of that water goes back into the ground from whence it came, largely unmolested. For that matter, when I flush my toilet the water isn't destroyed, it just goes to be cleaned up and released back into the wild. I'm still not sure if the cleaning process is a challenge because of the quantity of the liquid or the quantity of the contaminant (with low-flow toilets not changing the contamination of the water at all).

What are the real bottlenecks in our water system?

The problem is that almonds and watermelons are exported from California, exiting it's water cycle.

The actual water embodied in the exported almond is trivial. A bunch of water is lost in evaporation, but I don't know how that evaporation compares between these various food items, I got the impression that a ton of water is dumped on the almond trees at some critical moments, so I'd presume most goes back into the ground? Some water may be unsuitable for reuse even if it doesn't evaporate.

There is not a water-gallon's worth of hydrogren inside each almond.

Much larger in scale, alfalfa is also exported, often to Asia. "The water used to irrigate just alfalfa and hay — 7 trillion gallons per year — exceeds the irrigation needs of all the vegetables, berries, and fruit orchards combined." (Center for Science in the Public Interest; http://www.cspinet.org/EatingGreen/pdf/arguments4.pdf)

California produces almost all the almonds eaten in the United States, indeed, the world (80% of the world's supply).

It does not produce that much beef or chicken.

Thus.

Please don't present your beliefs as facts.

Texas is #1 with 11m head of cattle. California is #4 at 5m.

632 lbs production per head * 5.2m cattle = 1.6m tons.

US production of almonds = 1.4m tons.

You can't reason about amounts merely by looking at normalized numbers. Billion dollar company X is growing 2% a year, and million dollar company Y is growing 5% a year. Only in normalized numbers is one more than the other. In absolute numbers this is not the case.

That doesn't contradict what the grandparent poster presented, which was that California provides the vast majority of the world's almond supply, but not nearly as much beef or chicken.

Pointing out that California is the fourth largest US state in cattle doesn't even approach contradicting that (indeed, its pretty good evidence that it is not as dominant of a beef provider as an almond provider.)

Now, if you want to argue that the claim about share of the world almond market is irrelevant and that what we should compare is the water demand of California's almond supply vs. the water demand of beef/chicken, that's a different point. But you shouldn't criticize the parent poster for presenting their belief as fact, and then counter with a fact claim that doesn't even contradict the fact claim they presented.

"It does not produce that much beef or chicken"

It produces quite a bit of beef.

A percentage is not an amount or measurement of production.

The percentage is important.

I don't live in California, but lets assume that the percentage of American beef that California produces matches up with the percentage of the beef I eat that is from California. I think that is more than generous.

So 5.7% of the beef I eat is Californian. The majority of the rest is raised in areas with their own independent water supplies.

Let's assume that the percentage of almonds that are from California matches up with the percentage of the world's almonds that are Californian. This is more than generous, as I wager exceptionally few of the almonds that I eat are imported, since the US exports almonds...

So 80% of the almonds that I eat are Californian.

If you want to defend almond-eating and condemn my beef-eating, those statistics are going to be a problem for you.

California could completely ban all cows within California and ban the export of Alfalfa for all I care. The price increase would not particularly bother me. If California halted production of almonds, I don't think almond-eaters would be very happy at all. For the record, I would support California doing both.

Why are you normalizing to world production and not how much you eat? 5% of cattle production could be a lot of cattle and 80% of almonds could be a fairly small amount of cattle.

Percentages of different things cannot be compared sanely.

Because if almond-eating is actually more defensible than beef-eating, then I should be able to replace my beef with almonds and leave California in a better situation. In reality though, if I replaced beef with almonds, California would be considerably worse off.

Think about it, which harms California's water supply more? A New Yorker drinking a gallon of cow's milk? Or a New Yorker drinking a gallon of almond milk?

What are you talking about? He says: California produces 80% of all almonds produced in the world. It does not produce 80% of all beef produced in the world.

So... you're agreeing with me that California does not produce anything vaguely like 80% of all the cattle in the world?

It's fairly obvious that more beef is consumed in the world than almonds. Thus, 80% of the world's almonds doesn't necessarily consume more water than the much smaller percent of the world's beef produced in California. If anything, it argues that beef shouldn't be produced in California since there are other producers of beef that can pick up the slack whereas there isn't likely to be (an)other producer(s) of almonds that can handle the world's demand if California were to cease production of almonds.

You said it doesn't produce that much. That is untrue.

5.7% of the US supply vs. 80% of the world supply...

What exactly are you calling untrue?

(Note that California cattle are not anywhere close in absolute water use either.)

Percentages are not amounts. He said it does not have that much cattle.

Can either of you give a source backing your argument?

They're both right: http://www.cattlerange.com/cattle-graphs/all-cattle-numbers....

California is #5, containing 5.7% (down a fair bit from a year ago) of all cattle in the US.

Since most cattle in California is dairy, not beef, your numbers don't disprove his statement.

So, they could stop beef and chicken production without crashing the local economy or depriving the market of meat, freeing up scarce water to sustain almond production?

Sure, it could. I mean, it could also stop producing almonds without crashing the local economy. But, sure.

Look, according to Slate, almonds use 1.1 trillion gallons of water per year in CA.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...

There are 5,000,000ish head of cattle in CA. This thing:

http://www.uaex.edu/publications/pdf/fsa-3021.pdf

suggests that the most water that any cow needs per day is 20 gallons. 20 x 365 x 5million = 36.5 billion gallons of water per year. Let's assume that that's holy shit an order of magnitude low, and it's 365 billion gallons of water per year -- so it's still only 1/3rd the amount of water that almonds use.

And thus, we talk about the amount of water that almonds use.

Sure, that's absolute numbers. But from a gallons-per-calorie point of view Almonds are more efficient. A social engineer would still want to discourage meat production.

Maybe a social engineer who wanted to lower worldwide water consumption would. But a social engineer who wanted to deal with California's drought would want to cope with almonds.

This is of course the bottom line.

California's reservoirs don't care about gaming numbers about "gallons per calorie", they care about how many gallons are used where.

And the simple fact is that almond production uses many, many, many, many more gallons of California water than cattle production does.

It appears this is already happening. Beef production is declining in CA and some farmers are switching from grass-fed to importing feed from other states.

California exports a lot of alfalfa to support beef production elsewhere, but even so, if you buy, say, grass-fed beef from New Zealand (I assume New Zealand's not suffering a draught?) you're fine

I can't imagine NZ are suffering from a drought. A few years back, I visited my brother in Auckland in a time when we had water restrictions at home (in South Australia).

Water was cheap there and in no danger of running short, so I got the impression that there was as much as you wanted to pay for. Which meant he'd often relax by standing in the shower drinking a beer.

Back home, councils were handing out water-saving shower heads, people could only water their gardens on alternating days, emptying dams made the news, etc.

New Zealand is actually suffering a pretty bad drought. One of the towns actually just up and ran out of water one day last month. (I know, cause I was there and it was weird). I guess this is such a common event that it doesn't even make the news anymore. See this article from 2012: http://www.3news.co.nz/nznews/water-restrictions-in-franz-jo...

People should at least try to see forest behind trees. It's not only cows or only almonds. The reason land dies is very complex one, mostly because ecosystems become unbalanced through abuse by CAFO and unsustainable farming.

Allan Savory TED talk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI on this topic

I'm not quite to giving up meat, but I have been trying to cook a couple meals a week with Beyond Chicken - a company I have no connection to. I had it catered at a past job one day and decided it would do. Goes great in fried rice, on salads, in pasta.

I think we'll see gradual transition on a few fronts, especially if substitutes improve and meat rises in price. More and more people won't be vego, but will have smaller meat components to regular meals, or go meat-free 1-2 dinners/week, etc.

To me the whole vertical farming/hydroponics thing seems like a no-brainer. Although I suspect that they might rely more on direct sunlight rather than LEDs to control costs for large scale systems.

But basically if you have an enclosed system then you can save a dramatic amount of water because you don't have the evaporation etc.

I am guessing its probably cheaper for farmers, unless they have one or two internal genius engineers, to do traditional farming, partly because anyone who really knows how to do a large scale hydroponic/vertical farm system charges up the whazoo for that knowledge/system. If the water were priced realistically that probably wouldn't be the case though.

I think it would be good to focus on products that use less water and involve less horrific unnecessary treatment of animals. So maybe we can get by with fewer almonds _and_ fewer burgers, until we figure out better ways to make them.

I used to think that animal protein was necessary to be healthy, but now I am leaning towards meat almost being a bit of a vice. To be honest I still get a burger sometimes but I'm not sure its really a necessary part of my life. I have tried adding these textured vegetable protein so\y flour imitation sausage bits to my noodles and it actually seems very similar to meat.

One perspective on this whole meat thing. Before you know it, people could actually be meat in the eyes of super-intelligent AIs. Since these super-intelligent AIs will hopefully be trained with human knowledge and values, maybe we should raise them in a vegan culture. It could save our own skin.

Californian livestock (including cattle, chickens, etc.) uses approximately 9% of the nation's 2.14 billion gallon/day water on all livestock.[1] This equates to roughly 73 billion gallons per year. The report is a decade old, so I'll round that up to 100 billions of gallons used, per year, on meat products in California.

California almond farmers use 1.1 trillions of gallons per year.[2]

So yes, if anyone is to blame, it is definitely the almond farmers, as they use more than 10 times the amount of water than all meat farmers combined.

[1] https://water.usgs.gov/edu/wulv.html [2] http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30052290

Something about the numbers seems fishy. According to the source in the OP, California spends 47% of water on livestock and 9% on almonds. Perhaps you are counting only water that livestock drink, whereas the original was including the agricultural water for feed.

Your numbers don't add up. Rounding up to 3 billion gallons/day comes out to just under 1.1 trillion gallons per year. I know you pulled those numbers directly from the links you provided, but clearly one (or both) of them is erronous.

I suspect the discrepancy is that the article is likely including the crops (such as alfalfa) grown to feed the cow in the water usage footprint, as well, which I don't think your first link does.

On the theme of the impact of animal agriculture, here's a much deeper exploration of those impacts and a dizzying list of statistics and sources: http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts/

These numbers are provably wrong, not to mention comparing apples and oranges. At the very least their "3,000 and 5,000 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef." is completely disproven from their own source[1]. Waterfootprint.org gives 1,847 gal/lb. If we compute the numbers ourselves, we get very different numbers:

    Butter......... 4.89 cal/gal = 3,252 cal/lb /   665 gal/lb
    Cheese......... 4.75 cal/gal = 1,808 cal/lb /   381 gal/lb
    Milk........... 2.27 cal/gal = 276.7 cal/lb /   122 gal/lb
    Chicken........ 1.92 cal/gal = 993.4 cal/lb /   518 gal/lb
    Almonds........ 1.35 cal/gal = 2,608 cal/lb / 1,929 gal/lb
    Almonds Milk*.. (See Almonds)
    Ground Beef.... 0.81 cal/gal = 1,506 cal/lb / 1,847 gal/lb
    Almond Milk

* Almond Milk is basically almonds + water, but the added water is eclipsed by the almond water.

We see here, almonds aren't 10x more efficient, but closer to 2/3 more efficient, and of course cow milk is 2/3 more efficient than almond milk.

Further,

    More than half the entire US water supply goes to livestock

Water going to livestock is a misrepresentation since not all of it goes to produce meat, but in fact goes to produce milk, butter or cheese. I will admit though that the numbers above look slightly suspect. How/why would butter be more efficient?

Lastly, it completely (perhaps ignorantly again) misrepresents other meats with the following 2 easily disproven quotes:

    Meat processing, especially chicken,
    also uses large amounts of water

and...

    The more plant-based foods we eat versus
    animal-based foods….the less water, energy,
    and other natural resources we use

This is clearly false from the numbers above where chicken is actually 42% more efficient than almonds(!), which of course completely validates the anti-almond press and invalidates this entire blog post.

[1] http://www.waterfootprint.org/?page=files/productgallery where beef is listed at "15415 litre/kg"

They seem to have ignored that pastured livestock even exists.

It seems that Alpro almond milk[1] contains 2% almonds. So assuming that the percentage is similar for the undisclosed US percentage, almond milk is much more efficient than is implied in terms of gallons used per gallon of product.

[1] http://www.alpro.com/uk/products/drinks/almond/original-fres...

Having almost no knowlegde on how water supply works, I am curious. If you need more water, why can't you just produce more water? Wouldn't you just need to ship in more water (some pipes) and filter it (some facilities that do some chemistry tricks)?

Why is it not that easy?

And where would you get the water from at the other end of the pipe?

Would the ocean work?

is anybody actually accusing vegans of being behind the drought?

No, but the news coverage seems entirely aimed at plant farming, especially almonds for some reason, and rarely mentions animals even though they're more of a problem. Apparently the linked Times articles didn't talk about animals at all, which is odd.

Part of it is that almonds are a large, lucrative export market, while beef is not. While estimates vary, the best I could find is that California has 2% or less (600k) of the country's beef-cattle herd (30M-72M)and 12% of the country's human population. California eats the beef that California produces and much more, while the insidious almond robber-barons direct California's water into their international money-printing export machine for their own profit, depriving the rest of California of a large chunk of their lowland biosphere, destroying the land with subsidence and generally being extractive rather than productive, without benefit to the population. Or so the narrative goes.

Additionally, other crops can be and sometimes have been fallowed, while almond trees will apparently start to die without water, and take a decade to regrow.

10 Percent of California’s Water Goes to Almond Farming. That’s Nuts.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...

Animals are a huge deal, but I think the shock factor behind almonds is higher. "The entire animal industry in California uses a total of 30 percent, ok... wait, just almonds uses 10 percent?"

Perhaps especially because almonds are perceived as more of a luxury food than, say, ground beef or omelets.

Bee colony collapse and other bee death has been getting attention. Bees are shipped in to the almond groves in California. There's some suspicion that almond farmers use nicotinoids which harm bees; and that transporting bees leaves them more vulnerable to parasite.

So, that's one reason why almond farming is seeing more scrutiny recently.

Once you add the context that California grows all of the US's and most of the world's almonds it doesn't seem so ridiculous.

You should think about why California is growing almonds for the rest of the world.

Almond growers are acting against the best interests of their community for personal profit. Using fresh water that California cannot afford to use to grow their own bank accounts, with negligible benefit to Californians. Californians shouldn't tolerate this.

"But they pay tax on that profit, that means they are giving back!" you might object.

That is little more than a bribe to shut people up. What is California going to do, use that tax money to import fresh water? From where? From everywhere that they are shipping almonds to? Using that money to fund desalination plants might be a decent idea, but Californians seem fairly dead-set against desalination and I doubt the almond tax money would cover it anyway.

Well, it explains how it came to be that way. But then you wonder, "why". California is not water-rich. It's fundamentally incongruous. Should it be that way?

But you can see why vegans would feel unfairly targeted.

I think both livestock and almonds need attention, and I think both are getting attention. Ten percent is not the single largest slice of the pie, but that doesn't mean we ignore it while we work on the livestock slice of the pie.

At least in my social media feeds, a lot more than half the discussion regarding this issue is focused on almonds, while meat consumption is getting closer to 10%.

Do vegans eat notably more almonds than the average person?

I honestly don't see why they would feel targeted.

No, but the article is written by someone who identifies as a vicious vegan; not an understanding-vegan, a compromising-vegan, or even a strongly-opinionated-but-reasonable vegan. But instead, it's by a vicious vegan who, judging by the sarcastic and defensive tone, is taking the nytime's report of our almond trees and drought as a personal attack.

It would be obnoxious to copy it for this post, but I think that by not having the title in all caps like the article does, it loses that it's supposed to be sarcastic.

Not in the least. I picked up on it immediately, although the sarcastic tone puts me off reading the article.

Too right.

Edit: Just to be clear, I understand that the title is sarcastic and am in agreement with the content of TFA.

Deleted comment

Because deflection from the content of a criticism that one dislikes is novel?

The only person I know that drinks almond milk regularly is in fact not vegan, and according to their doctor need to drink almond milk due to reducing their cholesterol intake from all the meat they have eaten in their lives. (Yes, I know the science on cholesterol is changing.) This is an inflammatory and presumptuous headline, but this is HN after all...

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