[marcellus23]

I thought the problem is that that growing almonds is usually done in arid regions, so the issue is not that it uses lots of water, but that it uses lots of water in areas that frequently experience droughts. This is an honest question (I truly don't know, although I suspect I can guess): are dairy farms also common in those areas?

[lukeschlather]

Just for a single point of comparison, California's alfalfa consumes 15% of the state's water. All that alfalfa is going to feed cattle. California only produces 9% of the USA's alfalfa so it's easy to say that this is a tremendous amount of water.

Almonds also consume 15% of California's water. But California produces 80% of the world's almonds. We're talking about an order of magnitude difference in water consumption, almonds are far more efficient and beef is both far more wasteful and far more common.

[mrguyorama]

The comparison you are bringing up actually just gets to the heart of the issue.

California agricultural water is so fucking cheap, you can buy foreign land, start a farm, grow a bunch of grass, and ship it over to your country.

And that's cheaper than just growing grass locally.

That's insane

Most problems California has are the same: Systems that were initially designed and built a hundred or more years ago to support a state of like a hundred people, and an utter refusal to update those agreements because it would slightly inconvenience some really wealthy farms.

Growing Almonds and Alfalfa in California would be fine if they paid market rates for the water, and would therefore be more conscientious about using it and not wasting it, and that would dramatically improve the water situation of California and upstream places.

But it's way cheaper to pay for people to run absurd narratives on Fox News to make it a culture war issue so that you never have to care.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aux22FHTFXQ

The situation is so fucked up. It's a war of the rich against the richer. Wealthy farm corporations all have lobbying groups, and instead of lobbying for a more free market distribution of water, where they could have all they want as long as they pay for it, they run political campaigns to ensure California never reforms it's water rights system and continues to die of thirst while giving away 90% of it's water for rates decided 100 years ago. All the political agitation about water in California is over an absolute minuscule fraction of the water distribution, because actually fixing the problem would mean these farms paying market rates for water, which they do not currently do.

A microcosm of the US problem basically.

[Yeul]

Corporations never want to pay for the problems that they cause. They would rather go bankrupt and start a new company.

[thayne]

World beef production is approx. 60x almond production by mass, and that doesn't include dairy. That isn't the whole story, because cattle use more water than just what is used to grow alfalfa, but you are comparing apples to oranges here.

[rcpt]

You can check the per calorie stats.

Animal agriculture is wildly inefficient and honestly it's not surprising because you have to keep living moving animals around for it.

[lukeschlather]

I was drawing a point of comparison in response to the question about almonds disproportionately using scarce water resources in arid areas, which is a different question from overall water usage. My point was that almond water usage is literally only an issue in California, and that their water usage is not that extreme given the size of the market California serves.

[rcpt]

tbf some of the alfalfa is shipped to China it's not all used on cows here

[HowardStark]

It’s been some years but I recall that at one point probably around 2016-2017, California produced 80% of the world’s almonds. This was notable because at the same time, California was experiencing historic droughts.

[Faelon]

Yes- about half of the total water siphoned from the Colorado river goes to cows. This number astounded me when I first read it, and I hope it has a similar effect on you. I don't like almond milk, for what it's worth, and I don't think we should ignore plant-based foods with a high climate impact, but animal agriculture is the most environmentally devastating institution we have individual power to transition from. https://www.npr.org/2024/09/09/nx-s1-5002090/colorado-river-...