[dd_roger]

> A pound of steak requires 4000 to 6000 gallons of water.

People keep throwing this number around but it's at best voluntarily missleading, if not straight up a lie.

4 to 6k gallons is roughly what a meat cow (slaughtered at 18 months of age) will use in its lifetime (which btw if a lot less than the average westerner in the same time span). To stretch it to "4 to 6k gallons per pound of beef" you have to include the rain that watered its pasture, which makes absolutely no sense. Nobody ever tells that a bread loaf requires 500L of water to produce (roughly the quantity of water needed to water 1 bread loaf worth of wheat) because this water falls for free from the sky anyway.

Now you can make intricate arguments about how if there were other types of ecosystems in place of pastures more water could be retained in the soil and would eventually make its way to aquafiers or rivers -which is true- but I'm confident this isn't how people interpret this number. The goal of people who provide this number without any context is to give the impression that eating a pound of beef is equivalent to letting the faucet open for 4k+ gallons worth of water, which it absolutely isn't.

[AnimalMuppet]

> To stretch it to "4 to 6k gallons per pound of beef" you have to include the rain that watered its pasture, which makes absolutely no sense. Nobody ever tells that a bread loaf requires 500L of water to produce (roughly the quantity of water needed to water 1 bread loaf worth of wheat) because this water falls for free from the sky anyway.

Not in the west, it doesn't. The water for the pasture (or the alfalfa for the feed lot), and the water to grow the wheat, are often pumped from an aquifer. And some of the more important aquifers are shrinking.

But the overall point is a valid one. I note that 500L of water is about 125 gallons. Per loaf of bread.

[dd_roger]

> Not in the west, it doesn't.

(edit: just realised that maybe you meant the west of the USA and not the western world in general, in this case you might be right I'm obviously not aware of local practices from the other side of the world)

It does, I absolutely hate using authoritative argument but my family raises cattle and I've never seen a watered pasture in my life. I wonder what's the background of people teaching me online "how things really are".

In bad years when it doesn't rain enough for grass to grow, people get rid of the animals they can't afford to feed. There's no system in place to water the pastures and "save the harvest".

If you buy cheap, low quality meat from animals that never grazed and are fed grain and silage all year round then yes these feed crops would probably have been watered at some point (but even then, not 100% of the water comes from irigation). The broad avilability of meat grown in miserable conditions is a problem as well but not the one I'm talking about.

[AnimalMuppet]

Yes, I meant the west of the USA. West of the 100th Meridian, you're west of the western edge of the Gulf of Mexico, and therefore you get significantly less rain.

You can see this when you're driving. If you drive west on I-70, the trees stop about 20 miles west of Salina Kansas. On I-80 you're close to the Platte River so it's not quite as stark.

[throwawayffffas]

Also fun fact, a cow does not yield a single stake, if I recall correctly a cow yields 30-40% of it's weight. Given a stake is 250 grams and a cow weights over 300kgs that's about 400 "steaks" (a cow yields a lot of cuts not just steaks) per cow. So that's about 10 to 15 gallons of water per "steak".

[mark_l_watson]

I just did a web search: the results seem to be in the range 1800 t 2400 gallons per pound of beef produced.

Were did you get your numbers from?