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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

In a way - it mostly provides for dairy, which is an incredibly lossy operation.

The "alfalfa in the desert" stuff you hear about isn't for salads. It's feed for cattle.

A gallon of milk requires [edit](4-5 gallons excluding consumption for growing feed, ~800 gallons, contested, fully realized)[1, 2] and a pound of beef requires somewhere in the neighborhood of 2000 gallons. [3]

Beef is where the water goes, not Nestle water bottles, which are silly too. You drink about 185 gallons of water per year, meaning 1 pound of beef consumes 10 years worth of your personal drinking budget. Assuming you drank every single drop out of a Nestle water bottle, it really does round to zero compared to agriculture.

[1] https://www.watereducation.org/post/food-facts-how-much-wate...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1092652/volume-of-water-...

[3] https://www.watercalculator.org/news/articles/beef-king-big-...

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> It's feed for cattle.

Saudi Dairy. All that alfalfa grown with groundwater in the desert is shipped to a country that banned growing alfalfa with groundwater in the desert.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/in-drought-stricken-ar...

https://www.fastcompany.com/90963878/arizona-is-evicting-a-s...

> The "alfalfa in the desert" stuff you hear about isn't for salads. It's feed for cattle.

Worse. It's feed for Chinese cattle in China. Alfalfa is shippable, and it gets shipped to the Chinese mainland. Economically speaking, alfalfa and water are pretty fungible, one's as good as the other, and they're buying it up subsidized by the US government to the detriment of American taxpayers. If we taxed alfalfa sold abroad to make the price reasonable, that nonsense would stop immediately.

now do almonds..... Which alot of people want to use as a replacement for things like Milk, or Flour....

Yes, almonds require a lot of water to grow also. Oat, soy and coconut require orders of magnitude less.

"It takes a bonkers 1,611 US gallons (6,098 litres) to produce 1 litre of almond milk,” says the Sustainable Restaurant Association’s Pete Hemingway." [1]

So that would be 6,000 gallons of water to make 1 Gallon of Almond Milk... that seems to be more than your 800 Gallon figure for cow milk....

Also you will take my Steak and Hamburger over my dead body... America will never, not in may life time, give up Beef, it is after all what is for dinner.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/food/2018/sep/05/ditch-the-almon...

Where did you get the idea I supported almond production for milk substitutes. I specifically cited other much lower water usage milk substitutes like oat and soy.

> Also you will take my Steak and Hamburger over my dead body... America will never, not in may life time, give up Beef, it is after all what is for dinner.

Also not relevant, but ok. I'll make a note of it.

Personally, I think meat should just be much more expensive, representing the actual consumption of resources in its production. That way we could just let the market sort it out.

Regardless, as I understand it, it's well-established that almond milk uses less water per gallon than dairy milk.

However, we grow almonds in areas that don't have enough water, and milk is often produced in areas with surplus water.

Either way, I prefer soy milk.

> Either way, I prefer soy milk.

Are you at all concerned about hormone imbalances?

The estrogenic substances are not present in physiological relevant concentrations, its not anything to worry about

> Personally, I think meat should just be much more expensive, representing the actual consumption of resources in its production. That way we could just let the market sort it out.

When the govt. starts subsidizing, the market cannot sort it out, or at least that is how I’ve seen things play out. I’m not a market expert by any means.

1) The link to their source doesn't go anywhere. Other sources have very different numbers: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1092652/volume-of-water-...

2) If you truly cared about this and weren't just using it to justify your milk consumption, why wouldn't you switch to a far less water intensive milk like soy milk?

Do you realize that the US native buffalo population used to be as high as 30 to 60 million before we decimated them?

30 to 60. million. grazers. Roaming the countryside, eating and pooping and fertilizing our soil. Remember when the US had some of the most fertile, nutrient-rich soil in the entire world? Remember how perfectly balanced our ecosystem was before we ruined it?

The issue is not ruminants. It's everything else we've done to this planet throwing everything life carefully manicured into disarray.

On the plus side there are a lot more people who get to be alive now.

there are ~90M cattle in the US, so more than before ?

Wonder much the average buffalo consumes vs the average cow?

It's probably relevant in order to provide some kind of scaling factor. :)

Probably more, considering they're likely similar mass but migrate more than cows do who are usually relatively confined

We eat about 40 million cows and 125 million pigs every year, and more than 8 Billion chicken. These are just the ones that are killed each year, the actual livestock inventory is much higher for cows, around 90 million cows. We absolutely will have to cut back production if we want to "sustainably" farm cattle.

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