Cows Suck Up More Water Than Almonds

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-04-13/cows-suck-up-more-of-california-s-water-than-almonds

By Justin Fox
April 13, 2015

Almond growers have been catching a lot of flak lately for snarfing up so much of California's water. This isn't entirely unfair -- almonds have been the state's big agricultural growth story during the past couple of decades, and they are thirsty little drupes. Still, it isn't the whole story. Last week Philip Bump of the Washington Post and Alissa Walker of Gizmodo both offered defenses of the almond-industrial complex that I would recommend reading if you're interested in that kind of stuff (I clearly am). Meanwhile, I figured I'd try to offer a little context.

Here are the top 10 water users among California's crops, compiled using the most recent California Department of Water Resources data I could get my hands on. I averaged data from one year of below-average precipitation, 2009, and one-year of above-average precipitation, 2010.

[click on the graph to get the full picture of how much water alfafa, used for cattle feed, uses.]



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Meanwhile, stuff that cows eat ranks pretty high on the list. There's alfalfa and pasture, of course. But also destined for livestock forage, according to this presentation by University of California-Davis irrigation specialist Blaine Hanson, is most of the corn, some of the flax and hops category (officially it's "other field crops," and includes sorghum, millet and sunflowers), plus a lot of the grains (which rank 11th in water use). In California, the livestock are overwhelmingly bovine, so put it all together and growing things to feed cattle use more than 10 million acre-feet of water in California in an average year. All the people in California used 8.6 million acre-feet a year in the two years in question. So that's interesting.

Now, the cattle themselves don't consume much water -- direct water use by livestock farmers in California seems to be quite modest. Also, I've already written a whole column about how comparing agricultural water use with urban water use can be misleading. People eat things that take lots of water to grow. People also eat cattle, and drink their milk. Still, it does seem important to understand that raising cattle takes up more of California's water than any other activity.

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