People often ask, “What’s the best way to reduce my water footprint?” and the conversation always drifts to meat eating. That’s because meat, especially beef, has a large water footprint — 1,800 gallons of water per pound of beef produced.
— from the article “The Water Footprint of Beef: Industrial vs Pasture-Raised” on the WaterCalculator.org website, November 2018.
Actually, despite what the folks at WaterCalculator.org might believe, it’s been my experience that people do not often ask, “What’s the best way to reduce my water footprint?” I’ve never heard anyone ask that question here in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. Nor have I observed that the conversation “always drifts to meat eating.”
I have the distinct impression, as an observer of human behaviors in southwest Colorado, that when people eat meat, especially beef, they spend no time at all thinking about, or asking questions about, where the meat came from or how many gallons of water were required to produce their quarter-pound burger. (That would be about 450 gallons. But who’s counting?)
But now that we’re on the subject…
My father, who spent most of his career teaching high school English, shared a story once about the word, “beef”… derived from the French word, “boeuf”.
It seems that, back in 1066, an army of Normans, Bretons, Flemish, and soldiers from other French provinces, led by William the Conqueror (as he came to be known) crossed the English Channel and defeated the English army. (The English had left half their army in northern England, fighting off a Norwegian invasion. If you were an English soldier in 1066, there were plenty of job opportunities.)
William was crowned King of England on December 25, 1066. Subsequently, the new ruling class changed the county’s “official language” to French, while the ordinary peasants continued speaking Anglo-Saxon. This resulted in the English language becoming a confusing mishmash of French and Anglo-Saxon.
For example, the animal standing out in the pasture continued to be called by its traditional Anglo-Saxon designation: “cow”.
Once the animal was properly barbecued and placed on his Lordship’s table, however, the meat was referred to using the French term for the same animal: “boeuf”.
A cow was something you herded. Beef was something you ate… if you could afford it. English peasants ate mostly oats, cheese, rye bread and maybe some fish. The ruling class ate beef. Lots of beef. Beef-eating, in fact, became a symbol of wealth among the English. A sign of worldly success, you might say.
(Disclaimer: I currently serve on the San Juan Water Conservancy District Board of Directors as an appointed volunteer, but this editorial series does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Board as a whole, nor of any individual Board members other than myself.)
As we approach the 1,000th anniversary of William the Conqueror’s coronation (presumably, a celebration is scheduled for December 25, 2066) we continue the fine French tradition of beef-eating.
But we’ve slacked off a bit lately. According to the website FarmProgress.com, the US hit its peak of ‘per capita’ beef consumption in 1976… a year when the average American ate about 94 pounds of beef. We are projected to eat only about 58 pounds per person in 2020.
The amount of chicken eaten, meanwhile, has been on the opposite track. Americans each ate about 28 pounds of chicken meat annually back in in 1960, but this year each of us will likely consume, on average, about 94 pounds.
The websites that discuss the change in America’s meat-eating preferences often make reference to climate change, because the generation of CO2 from beef production is substantially greater than from raising chickens. This little chart from Bloomberg.com gives a sense of the relative impacts.
The above chart doesn’t mention water consumption directly, but America’s ongoing switch from beef to poultry certainly must certainly be changing the impacts of ranching and farming in the direction of ‘less water use’. It appears that the production of a pound of beef, ready for sale, consumes maybe 2,000 gallons of water. (You can find various estimates, if you search the internet.) The production of a pound of chicken meat consumes maybe 600 gallons.
Growing a pound of wheat requires perhaps 200 gallons of water.
The 540-page Colorado Water Plan, as noted previously, does not mention the word “beef” anywhere in the document. Nor does it mention the terms “chicken”, or “poultry”. But we know from the US Department of Agriculture overview of Colorado that our ranches accommodated about 770,000 full-grown beef cattle in January, 2020. That would suggest about 440 million pounds of finished beef, at a “water cost” of about 2,000 gallons per pound.
880 billion gallons of water.
According to my pocket calculator, if Colorado stopped raising beef cattle, and switched to raising chickens instead… we could theoretically leave an extra 615 billions gallons of water in our rivers and streams each year. Or use it for other purposes.
Let’s put 615 billion gallons of saved water into perspective. On page 174 of the Colorado Water Plan (2015) we see an estimated total of the state’s predicted water “shortage” in 2050. If I am reading the chart correctly, the predicted shortage appears to be “310,000-560,000” acre-feet. That’s about 182 billion acre-feet of water. We could easily address the 2050 shortfall predicted by the Colorado Water Plan, by raising chickens instead of beef. (We would, however, forego the aura of success that beef-eating has traditionally provided.)
It would appear that, per gram of protein, wheat requires about one-sixth the amount of water of beef production. Chicken is not far from that figure, requiring about one-fourth the amount of water per gram of protein — compared to beef.
Colorado and the American West do indeed have water issues that have little to do with beef consumption. But we can easily make the case, I think, that we’ve been eating our way into a water crisis. And perhaps, into a climate crisis as well.
The State of Colorado seems to be looking at the problem through a completely different lens.