this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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if you think that's wild, animal agriculture uses 13 TRILLION litres or gallons of water a year. Compared with fracking, which uses 220 billiion.
i don't think that's right. can you substantiate that?
oh, you know what? it's actually worse. significantly worse. It's 34-76 trillion gallons annually, https://www.cowspiracy.com/facts
the USGS paper says almost no water goes to livestock
both of those are 20 years out of date but I'll look at the methodology. it still seems off by orders of magnitude
here's the relevant section from the pimentel paper
so it looks like the methodology isn't even explicit in this paper, and we need to see pimentel's OTHER 2004 publication to understand how he arrived at the water values. MY SUSPICION is that he includes the water used in, for instance, cotton production to add to the sum used in livestock. that's at best an oversight: that "use" is actually a conservation of resources. given that i do see soy mentioned, i would also guess that it's including the waste product from soybean oil production, which accounts for 85% of the global crop weight but only 17% of the end use weight. the remaining ~68% of the global crop weight would be waste if not fed to livestock.
i can dig into the further methodology after work, but you should be dubious about these claims, especially the original source, which seems to be intentionally misrepresenting the USGS paper.