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Pasting mmanfrin's comment: It's specifically Beef that is the massive drain. Chicken/Pork/other meats are magnitudes of orders more water-conscious per calori

Pasting mmanfrin's comment: It's specifically Beef that is the massive drain. Chicken/Pork/other meats are magnitudes of orders more water-conscious per calorie. (Pork uses 75% less, and is yet the most wasteful of water outside of cows/bovine)[1]. Beef is astoundingly wasteful of water. You could take an hour-long shower and it would use about the same amount of water needed for a pound of beef. [2] and [3]. [1] http://gracelinks.org/blog/1143/beef-the-king-of-the-big-wat.. http://gracelinks.org/blog/1143/beef-the-king-of-the-big-wat.... [2] http://www.wsscwater.com/home/jsp/content/water-usagechart.f.. http://www.wsscwater.com/home/jsp/content/water-usagechart.f.... [3] http://blog.epa.gov/healthywaters/2012/03/virtual-water-real.. http://blog.epa.gov/healthywaters/2012/03/virtual-water-real.... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8117761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8117761

Spooky23 12y ago
Beef used to be more expensive as compared to chicken. It's cheap now because you can buy near worthless land and turn it into feedlots and ranches. Those scale that you can operate on with modern, subsidized agriculture is unstoppable. A farm in upstate NY is 50-500 acres. A ranch in the high desert may be 50 miles^2. Also, the land isn't empty in the east, and people won't put up with the smell of thousands of cattle. Stop giving away water to desert farmers. Prices will rise, and demand will shift to places where water is plentiful.