How Much Water Is Used For Animal Agriculture

Meat Atlas 2021

All animal products have a water footprint: the amount of h2o needed to produce them. Information technology is not just the total amount that
is of import, but the types of water that are needed. In that location is enough "light-green" h2o. Merely the volumes of "blue" and "grayness" h2o should exist kept low.

In general, more water is needed to produce meat than plant-based foods such as grains or beans. The boilerplate water footprint per calorie for beef is 20 times that of grain. But not all meat is the aforementioned, and the species of livestock and the management type affect the water requirements considerably.

Producing a kilogram of beef takes an average of 15,415 litres of h2o. The same amount of sheep or goat meat takes almost 9,000 litres, a kilo of pork 6,000 litres, and of chicken iv,300 litres. In all, 92 percentage of the global h2o footprint goes towards agriculture, 29 per centum of which is used in animal production. According to another adding, agronomics uses 70 percent of all available fresh h2o, three times equally much as 50 years ago.

But one beefsteak is non necessarily the same as another. The precise water footprint depends on the production arrangement in which the animate being was raised. Was the beast kept on pasture in a mixed organisation that included crops, or was it in an industrial system with high fauna numbers per hectare, in which over 90 percent of the feed is brought in? Simply as important are the limerick and origin of the feed.

Here's an example. The calculation that a kilogram of steak requires 15,415 litres of water assumes that the animal was slaughtered at iii years of age. During its lifetime, it will take eaten 1,300 kilograms of feed concentrate composed of diverse cereals and soybeans, plus 7,200 kilograms of roughage (grass, hay, silage). It will have drunk 24,000 litres of water. Its housing must also be cleaned and sprayed. Merely nigh of the h2o goes into producing the feed.

In making these calculations, nosotros must recall that a cow that has spent its life on a pasture in a humid region volition take a relatively large water footprint because the ample rainfall on its pasture is credited to the animal. Plus, information technology uses its pasture feed fairly inefficiently and takes a long time to achieve slaughter weight. This means nosotros should look at the water footprint more closely.