Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
back, driving cattle. One of its signature products—beef—is the most water-
intensive food produced anywhere. h e water footprint of beef includes water
used to grow feed grain, water used to produce the antibiotics administered
to cattle during their three-year average lifespan until slaughter, and water
used in processing the meat. h e water required to grow the feed grain alone
is about 4,042 gallons per animal. In addition, a cow drinks on average 6,340
gallons of water in three years. Added together, the amount of water used to
produce a single, six-ounce serving of steak is 2,600 gallons. Dairy products
are equally water-intensive for the same reasons. Forty-nine gallons of water
are used to produce a single eight-ounce glass of milk.
h ese numbers can radically alter how we compute actual water usage. On
average, the direct water usage per day—water used for drinking, cooking,
bathing, washing clothes, sanitation, and landscaping—is currently about
1,430 gallons per person in the American West. If the indirect, or embed-
ded, costs are included, the average water footprint per person per day jumps
to 4,110 gallons per day, or 1.5 million gallons per year—enough water to
submerge a football i eld to a depth of four feet.
h e water footprint of an average resident of the American West is sig-
nii cantly greater than that of a resident of the eastern United States. Higher
overall rainfall in the East, including summer rains, reduces the need for irri-
gation in landscaping and agriculture. In contrast, virtually all crops grown
in the arid West, and most landscaping, require irrigation, which increasingly
comes from ancient aquifers located beneath the ground. h ese concepts were
written about some twenty years ago by Marc Reisner in
Cadillac Desert:
h e West's real crisis is one of inertia, of will, and of myth. As Wallace
Stegner wrote, somehow the cow and the cowboy and the irrigated i eld came
to symbolize the region, instead of the bison and the salmon and the ante-
lope that once abounded here. But they might be driving bison, in reasonable
numbers, instead of cows, and raising them, for the most part, on unirrigated
land—which bison tolerate far better than cows. In a West that once and for
all made sense, you might import a lot more meat and dairy products from
states where they are raised on rain, rather than dream of importing those
states' rain. (pp. 514-15)
h e western water footprint expands far beyond its geographic boundar-
ies, since half of the nation's produce is grown in the West. Water policy
experts are now asking whether it makes sense for California and the West to
be growing water-intensive crops—such as cattle feed, rice, and cotton—for
the rest of the country.
