Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
27 times as much water as the cowboys' cow, and 769 times as much as the cows in Al-
berta. In the face of such uncertainty, a
Newsweek
reporter in 1998 decided that the safest
option was to state that 'the water that goes into a 1,000 pound steer would float a destroy-
er' and now there are 110 separate citations of this sentence on Google's search engine,
mostly on vegan and vegetarian websites.
There is an attempt to explain the provenance of some of these figures in an article
dating from about 2000, by John Robbins, heir to the Baskin Robbins ice cream empire and
spokesman for
Diet for a New America.
His opening sentence explains that he had been
'asked recently whether the figures given in
Diet for A New America
for how much water
it takes to produce a pound of meat today are still accurate.' He went on:
The figure of 2,500 US gallons to produce a pound of meat (roughly 20,000 litres
per kilo) comes from a statement by the renowned scientist Georg Borgstrom at the
1981 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Borgstrom was now inconveniently dead and unable to explain how he arrived at the fig-
ure. But happily the figure had been confirmed in an 'extraordinarily thorough' 162 page
report entitled
Water Inputs in California Food Production
- which unsurprisingly only
examined beef reared in California. Robbins goes on to quote Marc Reisner:
In California, the biggest single consumer of water is irrigated pasture: grass
grown in a near desert climate for cows. In 1986, irrigated pasture used about 5.3 mil-
lion acre-feet of water - as much as all 27 million people in the state consumed, in-
cluding for swimming pools and lawns … Is California atypical? Only in the sense
that agriculture in California, despite all the desert grass and irrigated rice, accounts
for proportionately less water use than in most of the other western states. In Color-
ado, for example, alfalfa to feed cows consumes nearly 30 per cent of all the state's
water.
In other words this figure of 20,000 litres per kilo of meat - a mere fifth of Pimentel's es-
timate - reflects performance in the corner of the United States which Marc Reisner mem-
orably named Cadillac Desert, where extractive irrigation is carried out on a scale that can-
not be afforded by any other country in the world.
Robbins continues:
It is not only Dr Borgstrom that has come to similar conclusions. In their landmark
book
Population Resources Environment
, Stanford Professors Paul R. and Anne H.
Ehrlich stated that the amount of water used to produce one pound of meat ranges
