HARD TO SWALLOW - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 77

So where could the other 24,900 litres per day that Pimentel claims Bramley consumed
possibly come from? About 100 litres was used at the slaughterhouse. Perhaps one should
include a proportion of what his mother drank; and what about the manufacture of plastic
bags that the beef was packed in, and the eartag? However many overheads one tries to
summon up (and there aren't that many with suckler beef), it is impossible to arrive at any
figure remotely resembling 25 tonnes per day or 100,000 litres per kilo. Bramley consumed
at the very most 50 tonnes of water in his entire life which works out at about 400 litres per
kilo of beef.
So how did Pimentel and his associates arrive at their figure? No doubt prodigious quant-
ities of water are required for US feedlots, where thousands of animals are confined and fed
upon lucerne and corn grown on irrigated land, and where mucking out must be an exercise
of Augean proportions. But not all beef is feedlot beef, by a very long chalk, and even if
the US feedlots' consumption bumps up the global average to 100,000 per kilo, which I
doubt, it seems a pointless and misleading exercise to bunch free range cows and feedlot
cows together under one integer.
I decided to check up the source material. In a book by Pimentel, Westra and Noss, I
found a table which did indeed state that beef used 100,000 litres of water per kilogram. 3
There was not a word about how this figure was derived, but I was referred to an article in
Bioscience by Pimentel and no less than nine other writers. I procured this and found that
it gave the same table, but also an indication as to how the figure was arrived at:
Producing 1 kg of beef requires approximately 100 kg of hay/forage and 4 kg of
grain. Producing this much forage and grain requires approximately 100,000 litres of
water to produce approximately 100 kg of plant biomass plus 5,400 litres to produce
4 kg of grain. 4
This makes it clear that Pimentel is not just referring to grain fed beef. On the contrary,
at 1000 litres per kilo of hay, against 1,350 litres per kilo of grain (which is more nutritious
than hay), Pimentel's figures suggest that beef from a cow fed on grain requires less water
than beef from a cow fed on hay or forage.
Anyone who has actually fed cows, and has a reasonable command of arithmetic, will
observe that Pimentel's cow eats about twice as much as is normally necessary to produce
a kilo of beef. 5 But this is a mere quibble compared to the question of how he manages
to derive a figure of 1,000 litres of water per 100 kilo of hay. Hay, in regions where grass
thrives, appears every year without the human application of any water whatsoever. Over
large parts of Britain, it is difficult to stop hay growing, which is why people use lawn-
mowers.