why is it a problem that it takes so much water to produce 1kg of beef – something like 15,000 liters – if the cows just pee it all back out anyway?
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That water is no longer in a useful form. It will eventually find its way back to the water cycle, but not necessarily any time soon or in a place where it’s useful.
Also, most of that goes into producing feed, not directly into the cow’s mouth.
most of the water is for feeding the crops and stuff. but clean water is not always available even if “it is recycled” through the water cycle.
The pee either goes into the ground or into a sewer. If a sewer, it ultimately ends up in the ocean. Oceanwater and groundwater are not usable by humans unless we operate wells, desalinization plants, or wait for the water to evaporate and be rained into freshwater lakes and rivers.
When 15,000 L of clean water are diverted to water a cow, that’s 15,000 L that are not available to a city downstream that needs drinking water. Or to a hydroelectric plant that needs the water to generate electricity. Or we have to burn more fossil fuels to power the wells and desalinization to obtain water.
So you’re right, there’s no change in how much water is actually on Earth. But the cows are changing where the water is and how much of it is available today for people’s needs.
Let’s imagine that every liter of water will be evaporated and rain down as fresh water 1 week after use. (That is a massive over-simplification, but it helps us think about it in broad terms.)
There is some amount of fresh water available. Let’s call all that water “100%”. We’ll note that by our assumption earlier, it renews itself roughly every week.
So, how much of that % of water should you spend on beef production? It is true that if we spent 100% of it on beef production for a week, then we’d get it all back.
However, then there would be no fresh water for anything else for that week!
Maybe we only spend a small amount on raising cattle, like 5%. Well, when we get that 5% back, where do we put it? Chances are we put it back into cattle farming, so unless we cut back on cattle farming, we don’t get the water ‘back’, because once it is renewed, it goes back to being used for this purpose.
Is it a problem that the water is being used? Well, other things might need water too. Maybe (again, just hypothetical numbers) we spend 5% on cattle, 15% of crop farming, 5% on drinking water, 15% on washing/hygeine, 20% for industry, and maybe 40% left in nature so that there are still freshwater rivers and ponds etc, rather than us drying them all up. If we give one of those things more water, then something else has to lose water for that week.
Point is, even though it is renewable, it is always a finite amount at any one time, and so any use of water means that it isn’t available elsewhere.
The main problem is that industrial meat production is very very inefficient… the bigger the animal gets the more inefficient it is.
The food we give to a cow has 25 times more calories than we get back as product. Chicken is “only” 9
Meaning that the feed we “waste” is huge… That is why there is huge research incentive for growing meat in the lab where it would be more efficient than a living animal
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Similar waste goes into water, most of the water is for the animal to live and grow, only a small portion comes back as useful product.
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Many problems are going to be solved, if we can develop the technology to grow meat without the living animal.
The cow doesn’t pee out 15,000 liters of water per kg of cow. Most of that water goes into producing the feed for the cow. It takes 6 kg of grain to produce 1 kg of beef. That 6 kg of grain has more food value than 1 kg of beef, so there is a lot of food (and water) basically being wasted to produce beef, and a lot of fossil fuels required to farm the grain to feed the cows (not to mention greenhouse gases produced by the cows themselves). And there’s a lot of clearcutting of South American rainforests (a major greenhouse-gas absorber and source of oxygen on our planet) to make room for pasture to raise more beef cattle.
I know some vegetarians who aren’t vegetarian out of compassion to animals, they’re vegetarian because they view it as good for the environment. Me, I could live without beef or pork or chicken, but I would find it hard to go without fish.
Water is drawn from deep underground aquifers through wells and peed onto arid ground where it evaporates and moves elsewhere. Eventually the well runs dry in an arid region, like where many ranches are located. It can takes hundreds or even thousands of years to replenish an aquifer through groundwater replenishment in a dry region… more so when huge quantities are drawn for residential and commercial use in addition to agriculture and ranching.
I think this really depends on local farming practices around you. In some countries beef is farmed pretty extensively, with most feed coming from grasses bulked out with human inedible crop waste. Since most feed comes from grass, most water comes from rainwater, so the cows aren’t converting clean drinking water into cow pee.
In other countries though farming can pretty intensive, with less land used and more resources like clean drinking water and grain are used to raise the same cows. That’s when the issues mentioned in the other posts become significant.
The water that the cows actually drink is a very small part of it. The water goes into stuff like land irrigation, producing feed, producing chemicals and medicines, all of that. Raising cows requires a lot of labour and equipment and all of that uses water. Not to mention that cow rearing is terrible for land – that’s a huge cause of rainforest destruction. We cut down rainforest to access the fertile soil, and grow grass on it for cows. Then after ten years of grass being grown under the hot sun, eaten and trampled by cows, that soil is dust. It totally screws up the water cycle.
These numbers are intended to be holistic, it’s all the aspects of growing a cow, not just the drinking water.
There’s a huge misconception in your question. That isn’t water the cow drinks. That’s water used to irrigate the fields that grow the soy beans and corn that is used to feed the cows. That water evaporates into the atmosphere. It isn’t water that the cow “just pees back out”.
It takes a massive amount of feed to raise a cow, and we only eat a small portion of it. Protein and nutrients from that feed have to go toward growing all the fur and skin and bones and internal organs and the rest of the animal that we don’t eat. That same quantity of feed, or at least the land and water and fertilizer, could grow grains and vegetables that could feed far more people than the quantity of meat from the cows that the same amount of land could support.
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