HARD TO SWALLOW - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 78

The only possible way you can assign that much water consumption to hay is by taking
into account every drop of rain that falls on the ground over a year. In the UK a hectare
of average grass produces the equivalent of about 10,000 kilos of hay and receives about
eight million litres of water in rainfall. 6 This is the equivalent of 800 litres of water per kilo
of hay. The UK is blessed with high fertility and temperate rainfall, so 1,000 litres of water
per kilo of hay equivalent is perhaps about right.
In other words, Pimentel's calculation takes into account every scrap of precipitation that
falls upon the area of land that a beef cow might occupy. This appears to be corroborated
by his statement in the same paper that 'on rangeland more than 200,000 litres of water are
needed to produce one kilogram of beef', since normally the only water which rangeland
receives is rain. The reference for this figure was given as 'Thomas 1987'. When I got hold
of 'Thomas 1987', a charming article about rangeland water by a farmer's son who eventu-
ally became President of New Mexico State University, it cited the figure but referred me
to 'Thomas 1977'. 7 At this point I gave up the chase.
There is no doubt some virtue in calculating the amount of rain that falls from the sky
upon the land which a beef cow occupies; but to suggest that this figure is a reflection of the
toll that meat production exacts upon global water reserves is absurd. And to claim, as is
currently now fashionable, that this figure represents 'embodied water' that can be expor-
ted to another country seems even more spurious. 8 Ninety-nine per cent of the rain would
fall onto the ground, and do much the same thing, whether the cow were there or not. If the
cow weren't there, the grass would still grow, and rabbits or deer or bison would graze it
and consume the same theoretical amount of water.
Pimentel's figure is not the only one: half an hour on a search engine is sufficient to
dig up a bewildering array of different estimates for the amount of water in a kilo of beef,
Pimentel's just happens to be the largest. Marc Reisner gives between 16,000 litres and
166,000; the International Water Management Institute of Stockholm gives 70,000 litres;
New Scientist , citing Forbes magazine, gives 50,000; Herb Schulbach of the University of
California extension service gives 43,000 litres; Diet for a New America gives 20,000; Jim
Oltjen of the Department of Animal Science at UC Davis California (supported by Gerald
Ward at the Department of Animal Science at Colorado) comes up with 3660 litres; and the
Alberta Beef Industry claims it is just 130 litres. 9 To borrow a comment made by George
Monbiot about different figures given for the price of nuclear energy, the amount of water
consumed by a beef cow appears to be a function of your political position. 10 The National
Cattlemen's Beef Association cite Oltjen's figure - a man whose bias (we are told) is be-
trayed by the official University portrait of him in a cowboy hat. But whereas, in Monbiot's
example, the New Economic Foundation's nuclear electricity costs eight times as much as
the Nuclear Energy Institute's, in the field of bovine water consumption the ideological po-
larization is of a different order of magnitude: the green environmentalist's cow consumes