It's just a tad bit more than NPR's 'trying to lose weight by cutting your fingernails'.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-j-rose/how-to-take-long-s...

http://www.onegreenplanet.org/news/californias-drought-whos-...

http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/sustain/global/sensem/MeatIndustry...

The organization that represents California cattle ranchers begged to differ, contesting that it's only 110 gallons: http://blog.calbeef.org/how-eco-friendly-is-beef-infographic...

Even using the latter number, just think about that. Eating one hamburger is like dumping 110 one-gallon jugs of water down the drain -- or leaving your kitchen faucet running full blast for over an hour with the current 1.8gpm flow restrictor mandated by code. Or flushing your code-mandated low-flow toilet 89 times.

And if you're talking about a 1-pound steak, multiply all those numbers by 4.

Am I saying you shouldn't eat beef? Of course not -- it's delicious! But California's beef producers should have to pay market rate for their water. If that means the price shoots up and I have to start eating hamburgers made from Texas cattle, so be it.

I know you understand this: you talk about eating Texas cattle instead of California cattle, but I wanted to emphasize it for others.

Vast numbers of cattle are raised in semi-desert conditions in Texas and Montana without the use of irrigated feedstock. Those cattle occupy the same ecological niche as the bison did 150 years ago, with a similar environmental impact. Tearing up the native prairie to grow any sort of grain or vegetable crop would destroy the land.

Montana boy here. Even if I concede for purposes of argument that cattle and bison are ecologically interchangeable ungulates (debateable at best), surely we can all agree that it is not the cattle but rather the cattlemen primarily responsible for reshaping the natural environment in the American West, by bulldozing stock ponds, stringing barbed wire over the range, drilling wells, poisoning coyotes, supplanting native grasses with snakeweed and cheatgrass, and most importantly by enforcing a monoculture of cattle. Nature abhors a monoculture almost as much as it abhors a vacuum, and you would never find a bison-era Western landscape with only a single species of charismatic megafauna.

Nobody objects to a smallholder's spread of a dozen head of angus, but when millions of acres are given over to beef production alone, it's broadly disingenuous to claim that the environmental impact of cattle is isomorphic to that of bison on a systems level.

Cattle country today looks like this [0] and this [1], for miles and miles and miles.

Bison country looked like this [2].

It's hard to see how those landscapes are even approximately interchangeable.

[0] http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/HA027__1MHK0-1...

[1] http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/HA030__1MHK0-1...

[2] http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/HA031__1MHK0-2...

NB. All these pictures are taken from an excellent and rather relevant piece of journalism that ran in Harpers here (paywall): http://harpers.org/archive/2015/02/the-great-republican-land...

And I stole my list of rancher's sins from Ed Abbey.

"Those cattle occupy the same ecological niche as the bison did 150 years ago, with a similar environmental impact. Tearing up the native prairie to grow any sort of grain or vegetable crop would destroy the land."

No. Bison bite off the grass, leaving the roots. Unlike cattle. Some argue that bison were an important part of the ecosystem.

http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/regions/northamerica/un...

Joel Salatin, of Polyface Farms here in Virginia, uses this practice to good success.

I don't know if such practices can sustain the volumes of cheap beef production we enjoy now, but if we properly managed large grazing areas this way, we could utilize land/water/feed much more efficiently than we do now.

Just like the water that comes out of my showerhead or toilet, but the state still places big restrictions on each of those.

In the cattle case, most of it goes to the superficial surface of the ground, and since so much of the beef and cattle operations in California don't have the luxury of grass or anything green on the ground, it just evaporates away.

Of course, cattle in California isn't raised on unirrigated native prairie, like they are in Texas or Montana.

IMVHO, there are much better reasons to drop meat + dairy from your diet than water. Human taste is a malleable thing - after a while, other things start to taste much more delicious.

We can agree to disagree and still be friends, or at least civil adults :)

You can agree to agree, I guess.

I don't mean that in a snide way, I just wonder what exactly you mean. Like, would it be okay under this market system for someone to purchase a large amount of the land where the water originates and construct a huge dam+reservoir? Would adjacent property owners have to go to court to redo the resolution of their competing interest in water that happens to flow across the properties?

But unless I'm mistaken I think you're implying that by removing beef production, you'd have to substitute it with additional vegetable or grain production.

Where I think the pro-vegetarian argument would actually be that by decreasing meat production, you actually recover more vegetable/grain farm capacity since it's much more efficient for people to eat their veggies directly.

Just like it would be much more efficient to eat the 10lbs of sardines it takes to grow 1lb of salmon. (NB. I didn't look that up, but I think it's in the ball-park.)

>But unless I'm mistaken I think you're implying that by removing beef production, you'd have to substitute it with additional vegetable or grain production.

There are a lot of non-simple factors involved for example dairy and meat account for a majority of most people's protein intake, this would mean substitution for increased protein nutrition from plants (limited mostly to soybeans).

>Where I think the pro-vegetarian argument would actually be that by decreasing meat production, you actually recover more vegetable/grain farm capacity since it's much more efficient for people to eat their veggies directly.

This statement is mostly true for using vegetable/grain production land whose produce is used for cattle feed-lots right? What about cattle that get the larger % of their food from grazing?

Also there is a significant difference between human quality/desired food and animal feed. For example a lot more corn is used in animal feed than in human consumption - this is especially effective because maize is a c4 plant and until genetics gets there will continue to completely dominate other cultivatable plants in terms of yield.

p.s. I'm not saying that meat production in the US is ecologically friendly - it definitely is not - feedlot greenhouse gas production is almost entirely unregulated, they cause massive damage to local watersheds etc - but it's possible to do terrible damage to the environment with vegetable growth as well; I'm just arguing for a more or less objective view of the situation (and I don't think meat is evil is the correct answer).

About 80 percent of agricultural production is animal-based while the remaining 20 percent mostly comes from field crops, mostly wheat. Only about 1 percent (1.35 million hectares) of total land is suitable for crops

1 almond = 7 calories, 7 cals / 1 gallon = 7 cals/gal

1 lb beef = 213 calories, 213 cals / (110 to 1300) gallons = 2 to .16 cals/gal.

So there you go.

It shoots up to 1500 calories.

The almonds and any measure of beef probably results in a huge waste compared to some other methods of "growing" calories. I don't see them going away, though.

1,300 gallons is nothing! Think about how much water it takes for one fish.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9301118

Source: http://www.waterfootprint.org/Reports/Fulton%20et%20al%20201...

The water footprint concept has been developed to estimate the amount of water consumed in the production of goods and services.

23 * 16 * 1.1 = 404 gallons per pound of almonds. It certainly doesn't rise to the level of meat, but it's still a lot. Almonds alone also supposedly account for 10% of all of California's water use.

Humanity is crazy. Simple as that.

We need to start thinking systemically; not react with myopic & reductionistic policies. Systemic solutions will solve our issues. Reductionistic policies will perpetuate this game.

Capital tends to pool together. These farms that are using up all of the water are capital intensive. In the mean time, large companies like Nestle are buying reservoirs in an effort to privatize the remaining water. The water supply is being diminished while the remaining water is being bought. One can infer that there are efforts to manipulate water supply to turn water into a commodity market that large corporations control. Intentional or not, that is what is going on right now.

It's highly misleading to suggest that the net impact of cycling a gallon of agricultural water (including irrigation + rainfall) is equal to that of a dumping a gallon of drinking water (packaged and delivered to your door, no less!) down the drain, of course.

Also, while the water footprint of almonds (and pistachios, cashews, etc) isn't great, if you aren't comparing it to that of other high-impact foods (in terms of water use by weight of end product) like say, dried tomatoes, butter, or most four-legged meat products -- not only per gram of end product, but per recommended serving (which for nut products is comparatively modest) -- then you're not only not helping us understand how we got into this mess (and how to get out); you're just pushing people's buttons, basically.

We need to end this across the board. If you can't produce something in the valley while paying a fair price for water, you shouldn't be producing it in the valley. Make something else, make it somewhere that's not drought-prone, or raise your prices to account for the water that goes into producing the product.

The average almond weighs under 2 g.

It follows that less than 0.05% of that water ends up in the final almond.

So...where does the remaining 99.95% of the gallon actually end up?

http://permaculturenews.org/2014/04/24/get-started-efficient...

Yes, there are differences in using water in one place versus another. I kind of think "growing food" is pretty important use for water though. If OP doesn't want the farmers to use the water for agriculture, then what is it being saved to use it for? Watering golf courses?

There is a small lake. This small lake is used as the freshwater drinking supply for a small town. The people in the small town are happy with the water.

Then someone downstream decides to grow some cows. The cows are thirsty and use a lot of water. The water comes from the lake, but there is enough rain so the people are still happy.

Then the rain stops. The lake shrinks, but the same amount of water continues to go to the cows. The water is poured onto the ground at the cows' feet. It is surely not wasted, because the water is going into the ground, but the people in the small town do not have enough water any more. They are less happy.

raldi's not calling for farmers to stop using water. He's calling for them to make the same reductions in use that everyone else has had to make. And, yeah, the water really is no longer available once it's used; Lake Oroville is not exactly the voluminous body of water it once was.

There's not really anything terribly controversial here.

When California growers tap into aquifers to grow their almond-beef-whatever, they're not using a renewable resource. They're using a very finite resource. The aquifers in CA are in real danger of tapping out. Why do we care?

1) it takes a huge amount of infrastructure to move around surface water

2) it takes a huge amount of infrastructure to clean surface water, whether we're just taking out the antibiotic residue and dirt and THC or desalinating

3) the cost of this transportation and purification infrastructure will dramatically impact where people can live and grow their food.

Moreover, aquifer depletion has some funky effects. Sinkholes in Florida that swallow houses come from aquifer depletion -- the ground there is riddled with holes that really need to full of water if you want to support weight [1]. Some lakes start draining if they're (somewhat unusually) geologically linked to a declining aquifer, like White Bear Lake in Minnesota [2]. Part of the culprit in MN is that people can drill wells and use up to 10,000 gallons per day without a permit. Switching to surface water is an option in the Midwest, and the municipalities mentioned in MN are thinking about switching to Mississippi river water. But in central California, what surface water are you going to use?

Last, for the self-interested, aquifer water often makes the best beers :)

[1] http://www.livescience.com/27659-florida-sinkhole.html [2] http://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2012/11/why-white-bear-lak...

We're fooled into believing water shortages are environmental problems we need to make sacrafices to prevent. But just paying more for more expensive, higher volume production or recylcing would work too. Eg Isreal.

But you are correct that they we're asking people to water their lawns once and a while. The difference here is that Ottawa gets its water from the Ottawa river which is a main tributary of the St-Laurent and is itself fed by a massive watershed starting about 7 hours north (funny thing, as you drive up highway 11 you will pass a sign that say "Now entering Arctic watershed").

Not to mention the fact that you don't live in one of the few places with abundant fresh water, even during a drought.