We here in Colorado have been in drought conditions for the past two years. It looks like next year will not be any different. There’s all sorts of water restrictions for residents to try to limit our effect.
However, according to an article I read today, sorry no link, 90% of water in Colorado is used for agriculture. Water used for irrigation is 40% absorbed by the plants but 60% evaporated.
So, the question is this: If all the veggie-evangelists had their way, and everybody abandoned meat, would we have enough water for a completely veggie society? Part of the answer hinges on the amount of water it takes to make a cow, too, I suppose.
It takes vastly more vegetation, and thus vastly more water, to support livestock than it does to support their dietary equivalent in veggies. This doesn’t even consider the water the critters drink.
Think about it – cows excrete (boy howdy, do they!), and we don’t eat the entire cow (or sheep, or goat, or ostrich, or whatever), so there’s a lot of wasted vegetation. Of course, the land that supports feed grain and pasture won’t necessarily support food-grade vegetables or grain, but I’m sure some of it will.
Asumming the data from this site is correct, your average cow will drink 8.75 gallons of water a day over the span of a year. Now, I’m no cattle expert and someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m finding that a beef cows average age at slaughter is around 18 months. So that’s about 4790 gallons of water over the lifetime of the cow. According to this approximately 38% of a cows gross weight is cut into edible meat. According to the figures here the average weight of a cattle a the time of slaught is about 1260 pounds (as of Nov 2002). So, we can figure that the average cow yields 479 pounds of beef that required 4790 gallons of drinking water. So, that’s 10 gallons per pound. Now, all we need to know is how much water is required to produce a pound of vegetables or grains or what have you.
By the way, non-biased sites about this stuff are hard to find.
After doing a little more reading on my first link from the above post, I realized that the water usage figures that I used belonged to 600 pound cows. I have no idea how to adjust my numbers accordingly, except to say that it looks like my numbers are about 40% below the final requirements for a 1200 pound beef cow, so, perhaps it would be wise to say that the actual numbers will be a fair amount higher than my ballpark math.
There are millions and millions of gallons of water on this planet. Only some of them are in the right place and in the right condition (think salt) for agricultural or human use.
It’s not a matter of “having enough”. It’s about distributing the readily (or not so readily) available good water to where it’s needed.
Now both these sites are vegan advocates so they’re not unbiased, and they don’t show their arithmetic so I’m not sure whether I believe their numbers or not. However, it does seem reasonable that raising beef is not the most efficient use of water resources. Novus did some interesting calculations above, but I think those estimates would turn out quite low when you consider all the water requirements. Very few beef cattle are raised exclusively on rain-watered “free range” pasture. Most have irrigated pasture, hay, oats, and/or corn supplements. It seems like you could make a whole lot of veggie polenta out of the feed required for one corn-fed steak (the fact that they’re different kinds of corn notwithstanding).
But my question (other than the grain-quality vs food-quality growing issue), is where are you going to put the cows??? If they can’t live on that land, where are they going to live? I would guess that most beef/dairy cattle could not survive in the wild for very long, and whatever amount could would be decimated compared to the amount owned/bred by farms (even with slaughtering). I get the impression that the mass extinction of cattle (and sheep, pigs, chickens, etc) just to feed the world a veggie diet isn’t really the goal most vegetarians are looking for…
I’ve heard the argument of the land required for meat eaters compaired to veg’ies. (somewhat along the requirements of water since it’s land with either crops or grassland for cow grasing).
I want to know if there will be enough land for cows once Dr. Atkins becoame mainstream.
Yeah, I was pondering these things myself. Plus, I’m sure that you should probably consider the amount of water used by the meat packing industry in creating an edible product. Also, one should consider the water used for purposes other than irrigation in crop production. I’m sure these indirect uses of water are almost completely in favor of non-meat production. 'Cause, you know, it takes less water to wash off your apples when they’re picked than it does to clean up the slaughterhouse. But, the only places I could really find a gal/pound number was from pro-vegetarian websites. One of the sites I saw stated that the number was 1500gal/pound of beef, which I find it hard to believe that my calculation was only 0.7% of the actual figure.
Actually, many members of PETA would probably advocate something quite like that. These animals (in the US at least) are almost entirely bred through artificial insemination. Once humans stop breeding them intentionally, their population would drop dramatically. Cows and chickens would still be useful for milk and eggs, assuming we’re not going vegan; goats could produce milk as well.
I think that the 15000L/Day number would have to be taking into account the water required to grow the grain that feeds the cows. Pretty soon we’re going to be calculating the water that the thirsty rancher drinks whilst he is working with his animals. Let’s see… You’d think he’d need about 4L a day at least, right?
By way of contrast, in New Zealand, (approx 1% of the cattle worldwide, and 10% of the international beef industry), pasture contributes over 95% of the total diet for almost all beef cattle, and feedlots are extremely rare. Many cattle are also raised on pasture for the dairy industry. (Pasture making up just over 50% of NZ land usage).
This is rain-watered pasture almost exclusively, NZ having an excellent climate for it – as opposed to having an unexceptional climate for grains, which explains a) why we don’t concentrate on these, b) why feedlots are rare, and c) why poultry and pork production (dependant on grain) are much lower than our cattle and sheep production.
In 2001, pastoral based products (meat, dairy, wool, leather, etc) made up 85% of all NZ agricultural export dollars, and 45% of total NZ export dollars.
So… we have plenty of rain-watered pasture, a great climate for raising beef and sheep, and only a so-so one for grains.
Going back to the OP, an interesting question would be: If all the veggie-evangelists had their way, and everybody abandoned meat, would the NZ agricultural industry survive, and would we have the appropriate land to grow veggie crops to replace them?
To the OP, if everyone was a vegaterian, there would be ‘extra’ water not less. Cows do drink water, but the water that goes into making the plants to feed the cows requires much more water.
As other people mentioned above, it’s not just what the cows drink that goes into a cow.
And, IMHO, a more interesting question would be, what would farmer’s really grow and what livestock would they raise if ALL U.S. farm subsidies were abolished?
Okay, it seems everyone here is forgetting a fairly basic fact about water. It doesn’t disappear after being absorbed/drunk by plants/animals. It doesn’t really “take” any water to produce any food. That is, water certainly has to be available in the system, but you don’t end up with less water at the end. Every bit of water that a cow drinks/consumes in foliage is released in the form of sweat/urine (or in milk, I suppose), except the water contained in the animal’s body at the time of slaughter, and any that’s been tied up into larger organic molecules by means of metabolic processes. I submit that anybody who’s trying to suggest that we shouldn’t eat meat because it’s a waste of water doesn’t understand basic ecology.
That said, in my own experience, beef cattle in the 500-700lb range drink roughly 5-7 gallons daily, while a mature bull, say, in the 1800-2000lb range might drink 15+ gallons. If you really want to account for water usage, you need to remember that cattle don’t drink water at all for the first few months of their lives, though presumably you’d want to account for the water content of the milk. And, of course, if you want the total amount of water that’s been used somewhere along the line, you’d also have to account for the water absorbed by the oats/barley/corn/alfalfa/grass/whatever that the cow eats as well. This number, I’d think, would be at least an order of magnitude higher than the water directly consumed.
Is there enough water for everyone to be a vegetarian? Of course. There’s also enough water for everyone to be strictly carnivorous. I suspect there isn’t enough arable land in the world for the latter, though.
Um. Not really. Most beef cattle are bred naturally. It’s much less expensive. Dairy cattle are almost all bred with AI, since the genetics of a dairy cow are worth vastly more $ than the genetics of a commercial beef animal. Most beef breeds are perfectly capable of surviving on their own, given availability of feed. Around here (central Saskatchewan), it’s routine for someone or other in the neighbourhood to have a couple head that got away sometime in fall and manage to avoid capture all winter. They’re typically fine in spring. Now, this is admittedly largely due to the fact that they can find feed in the form of haybales stacked here and there around the countryside - cows do suck at foraging through snow, unlike, for example, bison or deer.
So, if beef ranchers stopped managing their herds, what would happen? Well, if they just cut the wires and let the herd stray, the cattle population would dip slightly but not greatly. This wouldn’t happen, however, since the released cattle would be pests of enormous magnitude, and would consume large quantities of the cereal crops that would presumably be produced in their place. Hence, they would be shot. All of them. Except for a few that might be kept as pets (though who’d want a cow for a pet, I can’t quite fathom).
And the PETA is a little extreme regarding things like this, isn’t it? I mean, weren’t they the ones advocating “drink beer, not milk” ? I obviously cannot speak for everyone, but many vegetarians that I know (and I’ve read on these boards) have ethical issues with raising animals just to slaughter them…they don’t want animals to get hurt or suffer in any way. I know a few people, my sister for one, who attributes very human characteristics to animals, and because they couldn’t eat a person, they can’t eat an animal. I know that many people would have trouble advocating the exitinction of several species of animal for the mere purpose of having more people eat vegetarian diets. I eat meat, but I don’t want to eat an animal into extinction, either.
A little off topic, but I was wondering…isn’t vegetarianism (the ability for so many people to follow that kind of diet) without health risks (low iron, protein, etc) sort of a “side-effect” of modern society or at least of educated societies? I know some religions have been vegetarian for centuries, but it seems to me that all the health risks that need to be balanced (making sure you eat enough sources of protein, for example) is something that is only really possible in societies where these alternate sources are available. I’m thinking along the lines of some poor african culture, which suddenly stops eating meat. Do they have access to, or even the possibilty of growing alternate food sources such as peanuts? It’s all well and good to say that North America can do it, but could it actually be managed, safely, for everyone?
I don’t want to hijack this thread too much, so if answers to the question are too complex, I’d welcome another thread about it…
