Gov. Brown orders permanent water restrictions for California

[Exiled_Child]

There wouldn’t even be a water crisis if people didn’t eat meat. About 50% of California’s water is used to raise cows for meat and milk production, mostly to grow alfalfa to feed them. Another 30% or so is used for other agriculture, and the remaining twenty percent is used by industry and citizens. So it makes virtually no difference whether or not people water their lawns or take long showers; it has everything to do with what they eat. The person who eats hamburgers everyday uses far, far more water than do homeowners who own swimming pools, for instance.

 

[Monte_RCMS]

There wouldn’t even be a water crisis if people didn’t eat meat. About 50% of California’s water is used to raise cows for meat and milk production, mostly to grow alfalfa to feed them. Another 30% or so is used for other agriculture, and the remaining twenty percent is used by industry and citizens. So it makes virtually no difference whether or not people water their lawns or take long showers; it has everything to do with what they eat. The person who eats hamburgers everyday uses far, far more water than do homeowners who own swimming pools, for instance.

The problem is that most of the rain water ends up running down hill to the Pacific Ocean.

 

[estesbob]

There wouldn’t even be a water crisis if people didn’t eat meat. About 50% of California’s water is used to raise cows for meat and milk production, mostly to grow alfalfa to feed them. Another 30% or so is used for other agriculture, and the remaining twenty percent is used by industry and citizens. So it makes virtually no difference whether or not people water their lawns or take long showers; it has everything to do with what they eat. The person who eats hamburgers everyday uses far, far more water than do homeowners who own swimming pools, for instance.

Sounds like we could completely eliminate the problem if people just didn’t eat .

 

[Ridgerunner]

There wouldn’t even be a water crisis if people didn’t eat meat. About 50% of California’s water is used to raise cows for meat and milk production, mostly to grow alfalfa to feed them. Another 30% or so is used for other agriculture, and the remaining twenty percent is used by industry and citizens. So it makes virtually no difference whether or not people water their lawns or take long showers; it has everything to do with what they eat. The person who eats hamburgers everyday uses far, far more water than do homeowners who own swimming pools, for instance.

You would be talking about irrigation water, of course.

I agree it’s a terrible waste to irrigate alfalfa; a low-dollar crop, with irrigation water. The cattle are mostly dairy cattle, to my understanding, since it’s even more wasteful to feed alfalfa to beef cattle. They don’t need food that rich.

I think it would be better for the government to stop spending money to allow for alfalfa irrigation, and to do two things: First to stop corn subsidies in the grasslands; land poorly suited to corn production, so they can be used again for grazing. Second, to aid ranchers in establishing more efficient grazing practices in the grasslands. Why the government stopped allowing fast writeoff for the cost of building hay storage is beyond my comprehension, since dry storage saves about 30% of hay versus that which is stored outside. Finally, if the government wants milk to be cheap, then it could simply stop subsidizing its production in deserts and improve subsidies in places where the climate allows it naturally.

 

[meltzerboy]

Sounds like we could completely eliminate the problem if people just didn’t eat .

Or if people didn’t exist. We could eliminate a lot of problems that way.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Or if people didn’t exist. We could eliminate a lot of problems that way.

An interesting observation, sort of like the question whether a tree falling unheard in the forest actually makes a sound.

Elimination of people would certainly make a difference in the earth’s ecology. But nobody knows what it would be like since no habitable part of the earth has NOT been altered by humans since time immemorial. Even places we think of as “primeval” and “unspoiled” really aren’t.

But other creatures also make differences. Horses, for example, introduced rather late in U.S. history, alter the terrain in the grasslands in a way different from the way elk and bison do. Eurasian grasses and plants introduced here do as well. Hogs weren’t here before Europeans. Likely if there were no people all of a sudden, the ecology would change over a very long period of time, but it would remain altered from what it was before any particular change. And even in the U.S., the Indians altered the ecology significantly, so we have no idea what it would have been like without them.

Of course, if there were no people, who would note the changes?

 

[GEddie]

There wouldn’t even be a water crisis if people didn’t eat meat. About 50% of California’s water is used to raise cows for meat and milk production, mostly to grow alfalfa to feed them. Another 30% or so is used for other agriculture, and the remaining twenty percent is used by industry and citizens. So it makes virtually no difference whether or not people water their lawns or take long showers; it has everything to do with what they eat. The person who eats hamburgers everyday uses far, far more water than do homeowners who own swimming pools, for instance.

There is no way in Hell, Michigan, that I am going to become vegan, and I imagine millions will agree with me.

Why not pressure Californians (and Nevadans, Arizonians, and southwest Texans, for that matter) to give up their beautiful green lawns and turn to xeriscape? It would be less invasive of a personal change.

Shalom and ICXC NIKA

 

[tomarin]

There wouldn’t even be a water crisis if people didn’t eat meat. About 50% of California’s water is used to raise cows for meat and milk production, mostly to grow alfalfa to feed them. Another 30% or so is used for other agriculture, and the remaining twenty percent is used by industry and citizens. So it makes virtually no difference whether or not people water their lawns or take long showers; it has everything to do with what they eat. The person who eats hamburgers everyday uses far, far more water than do homeowners who own swimming pools, for instance.

Interesting point.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Interesting point.

Far more likely it would be a matter of not drinking milk or eating cheese or ice cream. It’s not economically sound to feed alfalfa to beef cattle. They can do perfectly well on ordinary prairie grass. Alfalfa is too expensive even in places where you don’t need to irrigate it. Dairy people feed alfalfa because it takes a lot of protein to make the kind of milk volume high-volume cows can produce.

Also, lots of people with horses will feed their horses alfalfa because it’s high protein on low volume. They don’t get “grass belly” that mars that sleek appearance a lot of horse owners prefer.

So I doubt hamburgers are responsible for much of the water usage. Probably it’s almost entirely due to consumption of milk and milk products.

It doesn’t need to happen, either, because milk can be shipped in from places where you don’t have to have heavily-subsidized irrigation in order to grow alfalfa.

 

[tomarin]

Far more likely it would be a matter of not drinking milk or eating cheese or ice cream. It’s not economically sound to feed alfalfa to beef cattle. They can do perfectly well on ordinary prairie grass. Alfalfa is too expensive even in places where you don’t need to irrigate it. Dairy people feed alfalfa because it takes a lot of protein to make the kind of milk volume high-volume cows can produce.

Also, lots of people with horses will feed their horses alfalfa because it’s high protein on low volume. They don’t get “grass belly” that mars that sleek appearance a lot of horse owners prefer.

So I doubt hamburgers are responsible for much of the water usage. Probably it’s almost entirely due to consumption of milk and milk products.

It doesn’t need to happen, either, because milk can be shipped in from places where you don’t have to have heavily-subsidized irrigation in order to grow alfalfa.

Even more interesting, and enlightening to boot!

 

[Ridgerunner]

Even more interesting, and enlightening to boot!

There have been a lot of changes in recent years concerning cattle nutrition. With dairy, it has always been the same. It takes a lot for a cow to produce milk. A lactating cow will eat twice as much or more as a 'dry" cow, and the quality needs to be higher; considerably higher if the cow is a dairy cow.

Beef cattle, interestingly, do perfectly well on most any kind of grass. In fact, they get fat on it, which is okay because when they have a calf, the drain of resources into milk production can be significant, and they thin down while they’re lactating. And “brown” fat, gained by eating grass is more important than “white” fat gained on feed.

Now, with beef breeds, nobody much thinks it’s important to pour an excess of protein into a beef cow anymore. More important is her gaining body fat prior to giving birth, and even more interestingly, if she’s lactating during the winter, the most important thing isn’t protein at all, but energy; heat generation. If you give her a heat-generating hay, she won’t lose weight to speak of even if she’s lactating. It doesn’t take all her reserves just to keep warm. The most heat-generating hays are not the highest protein hays. By way of example, bluestem is a relatively low-protein but high-energy grass, and hay made from it is the same. Bluestem can be grown without irrigation and at low cost. In fact, a couple of its varieties grow wild on the great plains, and did before white settlers arrived.

That’s the reason why cattle are a blessing to mankind. They produce high-quality, highly digestible protein by utilizing something that has zero nutritional value for people and is the only thing that can be successfully grown on 1/3 of the earth’s temperate land surface; grass.

But again, milk cows are very, very different. The milking quantity is so enormous with today’s milking breeds that there’s no alternative to giving them a high protein ration because protein is a big constituent of milk and it has to come from somewhere. It’s also lower in fat content than the milk of beef breeds, because people want it that way. Far and away the most common milk breed is Holstein. They’re kind of over-engineered to produce a very large quantity of fairly low fat milk.

There is one exception to the low-fat milk demand. The high-end ice cream makers like the high-fat-content milk, which the usual milking breeds don’t produce. It’s richer, creamier, and tastes better. So, oddly, there is a market among the really expensive ice cream brands for beef breed milk. It’s not commonly produced at all and the beef cows don’t produce much of it, which is why it’s so expensive.