[mike_d]

The biggest consumer of water in the state (about half) is environmental concerns. Trying to maintain wetlands, fish populations, etc.

Agriculture is 40%, and all consumer/urban consumption is 10%.

The solution to the water problem is trivial, but quite unpopular. Tax crops by the gallons per human calorie. That would eliminate a lot of the feed crops that we grow using our water and ship overseas, as well as dumb shit like almonds.

[r00fus]

Almonds pale in comparison to meat use of water. Your plan would work but CA milk/beef production would collapse - almonds would just get costlier (CA makes most of all almonds in the world).

[rhinoceraptor]

That's not really accurate, the vast majority of water "used" in beef production is green water. That is, rainfall and ground moisture in the grass that cattle eat, which obviously is subsequently urinated out and reincorporated into new grass and new topsoil. And the majority of what cattle eat, even conventional beef, is grass.

The amount of blue water use, that is, irrigated water pumped from aquifers and water bodies, is about 240 gallons per pound of beef [1]. Compare that with almonds, which clock in at about 630 gallons per pound [2].

If you use the misleading numbers that prevail in most publications, that's where you get the around 1800 gallons figure, since about 95% of that is green water.

1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X1...

2: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1470160X1...

[ncmncm]

That assumes the cattle are eating only grass, when in fact they are fattened for months on grain that has been irrigated.

[rhinoceraptor]

That first study was for conventional CAFO beef, it breaks down the component blue water usage from corn, soy, hay, grains, etc.

[frumper]

Driving up and down the state doesn't show a ton of grain being grown here, so either way the water isn't taken from California aquifers.

[ncmncm]

Last time I drove to Livermore, I passed one hell of a lot of maize.

[mistrial9]

> 1800 gallons figure, since about 95% of that is green water

ninety-five percent of a previously cited number is actually OK?

[yetihehe]

> Your plan would work but CA milk/beef production would collapse

Yeah, better to make beef for 10 more years and change your place into desert.

[rhinoceraptor]

Beef actually has a pretty moderate groundwater footprint, from what I've read it's less than half that of almonds per pound. That number is even smaller for grass finished beef. The numbers cited for water use for beef include rainfall that is incorporated into the grass that cattle graze, which is highly misleading.

[ArnoVW]

That's like saying : our nuclear power plant didn't have such a horrible accident, it has only released half of Chernobyl.

It's the same sort of reasoning that is leading people to say that they shouldn't have to pay tax / reduce CO2 because "someone else is richer / more polluting".

[rhinoceraptor]

Everything we eat has some groundwater use. I'm just saying that for its nutrient and caloric density, beef is vastly overrated in its water use. We tend to compare pounds of food to other pounds of food, but that is a misleading comparison. The nutritional value of meat has been very undervalued in the past few decades, and meat has a lot of nutritional value that we as humans cannot get on our own from plants.

That's not to say you should eat it for every meal, but ethically, environmentally and nutritionally, I really believe it is the best choice in terms of meat. Even CAFO beef, which is ethically pretty bad, is still vastly superior in that dimension to poultry and pretty much everything else.

Methane is another issue but I believe there is also a good argument in favor of it there as well. There is actually quite a lot of methane release from crops like rice which do not get media derision, as does the methane release from cattle.

[ncmncm]

People eat way more beef than almonds, in sum. So, beef production is an enormously bigger drain on water than almonds.

That said, most of the almonds are grown by a billionaire on stolen water.

[mike_d]

> CA makes most of all almonds in the world

Because they are water hungry and we have broken water economics here.

A single almond requires 12 liters of water to produce.

Almonds have no practical role in American diets aside from cakes, cookies, and liquors. Almond milk is inferior to oat milk in every way except in vitamin E levels.

[legostormtroopr]

But that 12 litres of water doesn't "disappear". It sits in the ground, it persperates in to the air, it becomes a part of the water cycle.

Its not like we are destroying 12 litres of water per almond (or I hope not).

[UncleMeat]

We have plenty of water. What we don't have is plenty of water in all the right places. Moving water is expensive. Water carried by the water cycle away to another region where there is little agriculture is roughly equivalent to disappearing it.

[mschuster91]

The key thing is the supply of water is limited, no matter where it ends up at. And as the supply of water is so limited, it is better from a point of efficiency to produce goods with a higher value for humans.

[imtringued]

It's not much use to us in the oceans.

[wbl]

Wisconsin is a real place.