How does it take over 600 gallons of water to make a single hamburger?
In: Biology
The big thing to understand here is that this is mostly rain water.
Growing crops (to feed animals) takes land. Water falls on that land (rain) and is counted as being used to grow that beef.
Is it used? Well, yes. But most goes to the ground. Plus it would still fall out off the sky if you weren’t growing crops to feed cattle. So did that figure make any sense? Not really
The other thing that nobody mentions is that you can get a lot of hamburgers out of one cow. If a single cow was raised just for meat and all that meat was turned into ground beef, you could get upwards of 750-1000 pounds of ground beef. That’s a lot of burgers!
this of course assumes you’re going to make a hamburger from scratch with absolutely nothing but some seeds and a pregnant cow.
the wheat for the bread is going to need water to grow. The Baby cow is going to need water to live. The lettuce and other veggies are going to need water too.
Most of the water is used to raise crops like alfalfa, which are then used to feed the cattle all their lives, which are then killed to make meat. (The cattle drink every day too.) So it’s a very indirect, wasteful process.
A major reason beef systems are so inefficient:
You have to maintain a herd of cows (females) and a few bulls to produce the calves that are grown for beef.
And each cow only has one calf at a time, and the calves take 1-3 years before being slaughtered.
So, to produce 100 beef calves for slaughter in a given year, you have to maintain >100 cows and a few bulls. That requires a lot of resources.
So, it’s not just the resources that go into growing the calf. It’s the resources that go into growing and maintaining its mother, year-round, to produce one calf.
It doesn’t. The water is also not suddenly gone just because it was used in agriculture. It’s just theoretical nonsense really.
I’ll also add that, even if we assume it takes 600 gallons of water to raise a cow from newborn to “ready to be made into a hamburger”, this number is still egregiously misleading. You get more than just a single hamburger from a single cow.
If we assume an average of 430 pounds of meat per cow (see https://www.oda.state.ok.us/food/fs-cowweight.pdf), that means approximately 1.4 gallons of water per pound of beef.
A typical fast food restaurant hamburger patty is 0.25 pounds. So, if we were crazy and turned all those excellent cuts of steak into ground beef and made hamburger patties, we would get 1,720 patties, bringing us to about 0.35 gallons of water per hamburger patty. This is 5.58 cups of water. Per hamburger. Not 600 gallons.
This all of course ignores water used for the ingredients to make the bun and toppings.
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