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