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by AnimalMuppet
1837 days ago
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> 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. |
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(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.