How Much Water Is Used For Animal Agriculture

The term "water footprint" is used to betoken the corporeality of fresh water that any given process or activity uses. Growing and processing crops and livestock consumes large quantities of h2o; therefore, the water footprint of food is high. Beast products, especially, similar meat, dairy and eggs (all of which tend to require more water than fruits, vegetables and beans) have an even college water footprint. Individually speaking, one's diet makes up the largest part of 1's personal water footprint. This is why preventing nutrient waste material individually matters: because discarded nutrient not only wastes the water that went into producing it, just all other resource involved, as well.

Three Components of H2o Footprints

H2o footprints were developed by the H2o Footprint Network to assess the amount of water (in different types) that is consumed in producing food and other products. Water footprints are composed of iii split calculations: ¹

Blue Water Footprint: The amount of surface water and groundwater required (evaporated or used directly) to produce an item. For food, this refers mainly to ingather irrigation.
Greenish Water Footprint: The corporeality of rainwater required (evaporated or used direct) to make an item. For food, this refers to dry farming where crops receive only rainwater.
Gray Water Footprint: The corporeality of fresh water required to dilute pollutants and brand h2o pure plenty to meet EPA water quality standards. For food, the water would have get polluted from agricultural runoff or leaching from the soil.

H2o, Food and Agriculture

In the Us, agronomics is responsible for lxxx percentage of all water consumed (through evaporation or other means that remove it from a watershed). ² It takes a surprising corporeality of water to grow and process food, because crops cannot abound without h2o, especially not without irrigation h2o. In fact, ane'south diet accounts for more than two thirds of ane's own total h2o footprint, generally because of all the "virtual water" needed to produce one's nutrient. Virtual water is the "hidden" component in a production process, which contributes to the total h2o footprint.

A typical lunch-fourth dimension meal reveals how quickly virtual water adds upwards, co-ordinate to information from the Water Footprint Network. ³ One loaf of breadstuff takes most 240 gallons of h2o to produce, while 1 pound of cheese takes nearly 382 gallons. A uncomplicated cheese sandwich adds up to about 56 gallons of water. Add some sliced turkey, and the water footprint jumps to 148 gallons. Throw in a small handbag of murphy chips at 12 gallons and you're upwardly to 160. Include an water ice-cold soda at 46, and this typical luncheon took 206 gallons of water to produce.

The Water Footprint of Food Infographic — Click prototype to view larger version.

The Water Footprint of Beef and Other Meat

Pound for pound, meat has a much college h2o footprint than vegetables, grains or beans. ⁴ A unmarried pound of beef takes, on average, i,800 gallons of water to produce. Xc-8 percent goes to watering the grass, forage and feed that cattle eat over their lifetime. ⁵ Where cattle nutrition consists mainly of grain-based feed, such as in industrial livestock production, the blue h2o footprint is high; where their diet consists mainly of grass and forage, the light-green water footprint is loftier.

Industrial Beef vs. Pastured Beefiness

In the U.s.a., at least 80 percent of beef cattle are "conventionally" raised, meaning that they typically spend half-dozen months grazing on pasture, so they become to a feedlot for four to six months where they swallow feed made from corn, soy and other grains. ^half-dozen While this type of diet speeds up the cattle's growth — a beef steer or heifer can eat one,000 pounds or more than of feed over a few months — it is non without costs. ⁷ With almost 29 million head of beef cattle produced in the US (as of 2012), grain is consumed in vast amounts. ⁸

Raising thousands of cattle on confining feedlots has ecological consequences. ⁹ Beginning, there is increased land use to abound the grain required. Likewise, all those animals collectively generate enormous piles of waste product, which must exist managed and which often end up polluting waterways. Much of the grain that cattle eat is from irrigated crops. For example, in 2012, corn production accounted for roughly 25 percent of total US-irrigated acreage harvested, ¹⁰ while hay and other forage production made up 18 percent. In addition, most irrigated acreage is located in the American plains and western states – regions that feel frequent droughts and water scarcity, placing boosted burdens on already stressed water supplies. All of this figures into the water footprint of conventional beef. ¹¹

Pasture-raised cattle, by comparison, spend their unabridged life eating grass. They typically take 24 to 28 months to reach market weight, because it takes longer for them to gain weight. ¹² Because they rely on grass that is predominantly rain-fed, grass-fed cattle have a college greenish water footprint, which isn't a problem unless there is a drought that impacts availability of grass. In improver, manure from grass-fed cattle production is typically used as country fertilizer and is office of regenerative agricultural practices in well-managed pasture operations.

The US and Global Water Footprint of Beef

Given that the average American eats around 181 pounds of meat annually, it is easy to run into how meat consumption might account for so much of an American's water footprint. ¹³ In fact, American meat consumption is nearly iii times that of the global average. ^fourteen Worldwide consumption of meat and animal products makes up 27 percent of humanity's total water footprint. ¹⁵ Of that total, 98 pct is due to the h2o required to produce animal feed, while water for drinking, cleaning and feed mixing constitutes just i.1 percent, 0.8 percent and 0.03 percent, respectively. ¹⁶

How and Where Food Comes from Impacts a Person's Water Footprint

Diets made upwards of highly processed foods — like packaged snacks and ready-made meals – too employ a lot of h2o. ¹⁷ For example, ounce for ounce, potato fries have a higher water footprint than whole potatoes. ¹⁸ Afterward growing the potatoes (which uses the most h2o), information technology takes more h2o to clean the potatoes and the processing machinery, plus even more h2o for producing cooking oil for deep frying, producing fuel for delivery and packaging the production. This quantity of h2o — that incorporates growing, processing, cooking, packaging and transport — is known equally "virtual water."

Where food is grown can also touch a person's water footprint. California, for example, produces more than nutrient than any other Usa state, supplying a large part of the country'due south milk, beef, produce and nuts. ¹⁹ ²⁰ It is also 1 of the nation's driest states and recently experienced a drought of celebrated proportions. As a result, California'due south agricultural sector puts enormous strain on the water supplies of the entire southwest, mainly through its allotments from the Colorado River, which it shares with other states. A pregnant portion of that limited water supply is then "shipped" as virtual water when they consign almonds or alfalfa (for animal feed) to other states or countries, like Japan and China. ²¹ ²² As well, when food is shipped from other states and countries, information technology taps into afar h2o supplies. As global merchandise increases the amount of food that is moved around the planet, these calculations get important indicators of the bodily amount of water used to go these foods to peoples' plates.

Transporting food over long distances also requires large quantities of fuel, which pollutes the air, contributes to climatic change and uses huge volumes of water. Producing gasoline and other transportation fuels requires h2o: nearly 3/4 gallon of water is needed to produce enough gasoline to drive one mile. ²³

In brusque, agronomics has a significant impact on water resources; and while people's private water footprints will never approach cypher, the more meat, dairy and candy foods each of us consumes, the more water we use and the college our water footprints. That is why it is important to understand how the diverse components of water footprints for a particular food item are calculated.