> The number 1 way to conserve water is to eat less meat.

Sure, but that's more of a global issue than a local one, insofar as meat (and food for livestock) is shipped much further than water is.

California produced about 2 billion pounds of beef last year. That comes out to 8% of the US market for beef, the vast majority of which comes from the US.

The numbers I found said that each pound of beef requires anywhere between 1000 and 5000 gallons of water. (I suspect the high end is probably too high, so let's go with the low end.) That gives us 2 trillion gallons of water used in California each year for beef production.

Back of the napkin: If 10% of people who get their beef from California replace it chicken (which uses about a half the water per pound, both are about 1,000 calories per pound), the state would save 100 billion gallons of water per year. That's about 3 days worth of water for the whole state.

(Apologies for lack of sources, I didn't realize this would turn into a research piece, so I didn't save them, but they seemed reputable.)

Thanks for that, but I think it somewhat misses the point. The demand-side of "everyone wants meat" problem is more of a long-term global-trends sustainability thing.

The California issue is that the cost of locally-used water is not being reflected in locally-produced meat.

People don't necessarily have to eat less meat in general, as long as less of the production comes specifically from California.

What percent of the population would have to stop eating meat all together in California to reduce consumption by the 20% that the Governor has called for?

If you're feeding beef irrigated feed, that's crazy.

But normally beef are fed crops that are highly drought resistant, like grass, alfalfa and barley.

Human crops like wheat, rice and corn require a lot more water than feed crops.

So if your rainfall levels are less than what is required by human food crops, you have several options:

- irrigate - grow cattle feed without irrigation - idle the land

The 3rd option may be the most environmentally friendly, but it doesn't feed anybody.

Beef may require more water per calorie than other foods, but it may still be more efficient. It doesn't really matter how much water is required -- it matters how much irrigation is required. And for beef, that number can be "0" in areas where nothing else is.

This link states that beef are normally fed corn:

http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn/background.aspx

Also, cows can drink up to 30 gallons of water per day:

https://beef.unl.edu/amountwatercowsdrink

I don't know how we could consider it to be more efficient than simply eating other foods (i.e. plants) under any circumstance when all variables are considered.

Beef in the States are normally fed corn, yes. And that's silly, yes.

Corn is heavily subsidized in the States, and also needs to be rationalized.

Under any circumstance? Please tell me what would be a more rational way of feeding people in Montana? Cows can graze on native prairie and have an ecological impact similar to the buffalo that predated them. Ripping up the native prairie to grow wheat or corn would destroy the soil and turn it into a desert in about 20 years.

The latest issue of National Geographic has a map showing meat calories consumed per-capita for various countries and regions around the world. The US is high, but more-or-less right on par (or a little under) with many other places: Brazil, western Europe, northern Europe, Australia, and China[1]. Some countries are considerably higher, including Argentina and Finland.

This is, indeed, a global phenomenon, not a US one.

[1] China is interesting in that the meat calories consumed is high, but the amount (in weight?) of meat consumed is less. This due to the consumed meat being largely high-fat-content pork.

Even if it is a global phenomenon, and even if the US is not the worst in terms of meat calories consumer per-capita, that doesn't negate the fact that we could still improve our environmental impact by eating less meat.

It's not a competition, we can still make an impact locally and globally by eating less meat.

Argentina and Finland are mostly-mountain countries. The water usage there is probably lower, and it doesn't matter (it is not used up in the growing of livestock feed, it passes through), and both countries have large areas where you can't eat the crops that do grow, but cows can.

So you shouldn't take them as examples. That their meat consumption is higher probably actually saves water.