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by htlion 1462 days ago
Residential is only 7% if you put the burden on the producer (agriculture) and not the consumer (people). Every time that such numbers are shared, most people quickly jumps to "farmers should pay more attention / switch cultures". Very rarely someone will talk about the impacts: a change of diet for consumers, most likely with less meat (though depends on the area). It is easy to assume that the water you consume only comes from the tap, but 1kg of beef meat costs 15,000 litres of water to produce [1]. Moreover, at a larger scale: "One third of this volume is for the beef cattle sector; another 19% for the dairy cattle sector." [1]. So instead of trying to find the scapegoat that supposedly consumes most of our water, we should all remember that we, meat eaters, are one of the main culprits here !

[1] https://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product-water-...
2 comments
danaris 1461 days ago
People will buy roughly the same amount of almonds whether they're produced in California or Ohio[0]. Claiming that we have to attribute agricultural water (ab)use to the consumer is just absolving the producers of any and all responsibility for destructive, short-sighted decisions about where and how to produce.

[0] Or any other place with a reasonable natural amount of rainfall. Nothing special about Ohio for this purpose.

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PaulDavisThe1st 1461 days ago
Not really.

I live in NM. The agriculture sector here produces less than 8% of both the calories and pounds of food consumed within the state. Most of the beef production in NM is exported out of state (and country).

So if the "burden is on the consumer", it's on people who don't live in US southwest, and that has to stop. The fever dreams of the 1930s/40s bureau of reclamation have done so much damage.

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htlion 1460 days ago
We need to compare the imported water from food and the exported water from food. Also, considering NM is a bit tricky. With 7 inhabitants /km2, NM is a very rural state, so it is expected that it would export its food. I would be very interested in the water balance for the US, knowing that we import a lot of soy for cattle.
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