Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
7
H
ARD TO
S
WALLOW
O
f all the statistical clichés about livestock that are passed like a relay baton from one
article or website to another, there is one that stands out in its enormity. George Monbiot,
writing in
The Guardian
, tells us that 'every kilogram of beef we consume, according to re-
search by the agronomists David Pimentel and Robert Goodland, requires around 100,000
litres of water to produce'. But it's unfair to single out Monbiot because the 100,000 litre
figure pops up all over the place, as often as not preceded by the word 'staggering'. It can
be found on dozens of websites representing groups as diverse as the Humanist Vegetari-
an Group and the Woodcraft Folk. Jonathan Porritt repeated it in
The Guardian
three years
ant, which appeared in the
Vegan
magazine, where Pimentel is quoted saying that 'it takes
around 100 times more water to produce 1 kg of beef than it does to produce 1 kg of wheat'
(which proves to be the same statistic, as we are also told that wheat requires a little less than
1000 litres per kilo).
2
Every kilo of beef? 100,000 litres sounds like a lot of water, and it is a lot of water. It
is the equivalent of an acre an inch deep in water. To put it into context, let's apply it to
Bramley, an Angus/Jersey cross steer I had the pleasure of rearing. Bramley, when he was
slaughtered, provided something over 125 kilos of meat. That means, according to Pimentel
and Goodland, that over the course of his 16 month life he consumed 12,500 tonnes of wa-
ter, which is the equivalent of an acre ten foot deep in water - or 25,000 litres on each of the
500 days of his life.
How he managed to achieve this feat this I am at a loss to explain, since all Bramley did
while he was alive was hang out in a field and eat grass, without ever manifesting any un-
usual appetite for water. For the first six months of his life he drank about a gallon and a half
of milk, and for the final ten months he ate maybe 50 kilos of fresh grass daily and drank
perhaps 50 litres of water. Even if we include the water in the grass he ate, this cannot have
been much more than 100 litres of water per day. And it's not as though he locked all this
water up in his little body so that nobody else could use it. Most of it either went back to the
land where it came from as urine or dung, or was else was transpired into the atmosphere to
reappear as rain somewhere else - which is also what happens to the rather larger quantities
of water drunk by the poplar trees that border the field he lived in.
