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Almonds consume as much California water as all household use
(www.c-win.org)
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this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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I agree it’s a large portion. However, the big difference is that most dairy and meat produced in state is not exported. Water is a public resource, so it should raise additional alarms when the public is not benefiting from its use.
The meat might not be exported, but the water intensive livestock feed sure is
We should account for the water of all agricultural exports more carefully.
https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/statistics/
It kind of seems like a lot of dairy is exported. Dairy was valued at $10.4 billion, Cattle and Calves: $3.63 billion, Almonds: $3.52 billion. I mean, unless California is consuming over 70% of $14 billion in cattle and dairy products, but exporting all the almonds.
You can click the export stats. Almonds are #1 export, followed by dairy. Dairy exports were about $2B out of $10B produced. So roughly 75% of dairy is not exported.
Well, I did a little analysis and almonds sure are a consumer of water in California, but I'd encourage you to look into the water, land use and emissions impact of cattle and dairy, I know, you are worried about exporting away all your water, but there are larger impact agricultural products and you said everything should be scrutinized more, so here is more scrutiny.
tl;dr: In 2022, California used this much water on these agricultural products: Almonds: 9 billion m³ Beef: 20 billion m³ Cheese: 4.4 billion m³ Butter: 1.3 billion m³
This doesn't factor in other dairy products because the data doesn't line up well enough to compute and I'm just some internet user, so what do I know?
Anyways land use is crazy, beef alone used 1 million acres, while all other field crops used 627 thousand acres. (Source: cdfa stat review)
blue water I could drink. cows make green water available to me.
Another big difference is the $38 billion in subsidies the meat and dairy industries get from U.S. taxpayers....That should also raise alarms.