It takes an entire ocean to produce a pound of fish, but it only takes

[HysteryDiagnosis]

2,500 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef.


http://www.vegsource.com/articles/factoids.htm

Putting water use info into perspective
If you shower each day for 7 minutes, using a shower with a flow rate of 2 gallons per minute, you are using 14 gallons of water per day (7 minutes x 2 gallons), or 98 gallons per week. Rounding that up to 100 gallons per week, in 52 weeks you would be using 5,200 gallons of water per year to take a daily shower.

Comparing 5,200 gallons of water used by taking a 7 minute shower every day for a year, to the 5,214 gallons of water it takes to produce a pound of beef (using the estimate noted by water specialists at the University of California, noted above), you realize that in California today, you can save more water by not eating a pound of beef than you will save by not showering for a year.


http://www.vegsource.com/articles/pimentel_water.htm

March 1, 2001 -- To date, probably the most reliable and widely-accepted water estimate to produce a pound of beef is the figure of 2,500 gallons/pound. Newsweek once put it another way: "the water that goes into a 1,000 pound steer would float a destroyer."

Not surprisingly, the beef industry promotes a study that determined, using highly suspect calculations, that only 441 gallons of water are required to produce a pound of beef.

(The cattlemen's study applied liberal deductions from water actually used, reasoning that water was evaporated at points during the process, or was "returned" to the water table after being used to grow plant feed, or was returned to the water table via urea and excrement from cows. Thus, study authors reasoned these waters were not "lost" but "recycled" and therefore could be subtracted from gross amount of water actually used in beef production.


Of course, evaporation and cow dung don't go very far in replenishing water pumped from acquifers which took thousands of years to fill. It's interesting to consider that if the same fuzzy math were applied to calculating how much water it takes to grow vegetables, potatoes would probably only require about 2 gallons of water per pound.)


http://www.vegsource.com/articles/factoids.htm

Water Required to produce one pound of U.S.beef: 2,400 gallons
(per Dr. Georg Borgstrom, Chairman of Food Science and Human Nutrition Dept of College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Michigan State University)

Water required to produce 1 pound of California beef: 2,464
per the Water Education Foundation

[eppur_se_muova]

1. That's gubmint subsidized water -- charged at 10% real cost.

Must be nice to be Big Agra, politicians are happy to mug the taxpayers for you.

Book rec: Marc Reisner's "Cadillac Desert" http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-9780140178241-0

[hobbit709]

2. and how much water does it take to irrigate crops in semi-arid regions?