Solving Our Water Problem
What I watched: “Who's really using up the water in the American West?” by Vox. Posted September 26, 2022.
I live in San Francisco. That means I live in the Western part of the United States where we’ve been gripped by the worst drought in 1,000 years. Water is in short supply and our sources are quickly drying up.
In light of climate change, it’s unlikely this situation is going to get better anytime soon. Sure, we might experience a year here and there of more rain, but overall it’s probably going to be drought conditions for us indefinitely. We have to figure out how to conserve water since we don’t have any magic solutions in place to produce water for the millions of people living in the West.
Water desalination plants are a possible solution, but they’re not going to solve the short-term problem and probably not the long-term problem either. They’ll be a great supplement if we can build and operate them with no drastic environmental impacts, but they’re only a drop in the proverbial bucket so to speak.
In California, efforts are underway to build and operate desalination plants off our coastline. They will certainly help, but they won’t be able to supply enough water overall to entirely address our lack of water sources. We have to figure out how to better use the water we do have. Plus, what about the rest of the Western states, some of which don’t have coastlines. They need water too.
Sometimes I hear loud calls for the elimination of residential swimming pools and golf courses, or not allowing the washing of cars or watering of lawns. Yes, they use water. Maybe someday they’ll be on the chopping block when drought conditions become catastrophic. But for now, it’s important to realize they are a tiny portion of water usage.
But this is all the residential water use for 115 million people across 17 Western states. All the lawn watering and tooth brushing and pools and showers is only 6% of all water consumption.
Yes, 6%. Surprised? I was when I first learned of the small percentage of water used by Western state residents.
The commercial and industrial sector (offices, hotel fountains, mines, power plants, and so on) accounts for just 8% of water use. That means all residential, commercial, and industrial water use in the 17 Western states is only 14% of all water consumption. The rest, 86%, is for growing crops and how that crop water is used points us to the place where we can better manage our water sources.
Irrigated agriculture is where we need to better manage water to have the biggest impact on overall water availability going forward. Farmers grow rice, soybeans, nuts, cotton, wheat, corn, and other crops such as fruits and vegetables. But the biggest percentage of water when compared to those crops is crops that humans don’t eat, crops grown to feed livestock, mostly cows.
Alfalfa accounts for most of the water used to grow livestock feed. Because it can be grown and harvested up to 12 times every year, farmers love it. If properly irrigated, it can thrive even in desert environments that comprise much of the American Southwest.
If we group alfalfa’s water use with that of the other livestock feed crops, grass hays and corn silage, it adds up to 32% of the West's entire water footprint. That is far more than all residential and commercial uses combined.
And we Americans really love our meat and dairy products. We eat nearly four times more beef than the global average. Over the past decades our dairy consumption has increased. Plus, at least 10% of the cattle feed grown in the United States ends up being shipped across the ocean to feed cows in Japan, China, and the Middle East.
So, what’s to be done about this situation? I’m not a fan of grass lawns and I’d like to see everyone move to zeroscaping or xeriscaping around their homes. Maybe golf courses, home pools, and other water uses can be cut back. But in the grand scheme of things, these aren’t vital water reductions in the short term because we need to tackle irrigation of crops to have the biggest impact on water conservation.
Of course, reducing meat and dairy consumption would be great. But I’m not naïve. I don’t think a huge percentage of people are going to suddenly start cutting back on eating meat or dairy. But trends do point to some people doing it already and I see no reason to believe that trend won’t continue. Vegan and vegetarian offerings in grocery stores and on restaurant menus have become commonplace in major urban American centers. Data suggests people are beginning to eat less meat. But globally, meat and dairy consumption is not going down.
In this article, Why Americans Are Choosing to Eat Less Meat, it points out that Americans are starting to eat less meat and trying out meat alternatives.
Despite the overall increase in meat consumption, the number of people reducing their consumption of meat is on the rise. A 2020 poll by Gallup found that 23 percent of adults in the U.S. claim they have reduced how much meat they consume. Demographics particularly likely to have reduced their meat consumption are people of the global majority (31 percent), women (31 percent), and registered Democrats (30 percent). Citizens across the various regions of the country indicated they were decreasing their meat consumption, including 17 percent in the Midwest, 23 percent in the East, 24 percent in the South, and 25 percent in the West.
Alongside this shift in meat consumption is an increase in the number of people trying plant-based alternatives. In another Gallup poll from 2020, 41 percent of adults in the U.S. reported having tried plant-based meats. Women (43 percent) were more likely to have tried a plant-based meat alternative than men (39 percent). Out of all age groups, those 65 and older (26 percent) were least likely to have tried an alternative. Over half of those from households making more than $100,000 a year had tried a plant-based meat product.
For those reading this who might be thinking that animal products provide greater human nutrition over non-meat sources per the water used to produce them, that’s not true. You’ll see in this article, Water footprint of crop and animal products: a comparison, animal products use far more water.
Per ton of product, animal products generally have a larger water footprint than crop products. The same is true when we look at the water footprint per calorie. The average water footprint per calorie for beef is twenty times larger than for cereals and starchy roots. When we look at the water requirements for protein, it has been found that the water footprint per gram of protein for milk, eggs and chicken meat is about 1.5 times larger than for pulses. For beef, the water footprint per gram of protein is 6 times larger than for pulses. In the case of fat, butter has a relatively small water footprint per gram of fat, even lower than for oil crops. All other animal products, however, have larger water footprints per gram of fat when compared to oil crops. From a freshwater resource perspective, it is more efficient to obtain calories, protein and fat through crop products than animal products.
I’d love to see people change their diets away from meat and dairy products, but I know it’s a hard sell for some. I believe the day will come when we eat far less meat than we do today, but for now other solutions appear to be needed to conserve water.
An approach highlighted in the video is what’s called “rotational fallowing.”
It enables agencies representing Metropolitan water users to set a price that they'll pay farmers to temporarily stop irrigating a portion of their fields. Farmers decide whether it's worth it in any given year to take that deal. And the unused water can then be sent to the cities or left in reservoirs.
The authors of this suggested approach contend that fallowing hay and alfalfa in the Colorado River Basin could solve the current 2022 drought crisis.
There are already long-term agreements to fallow farmland between the Los Angeles and San Diego water districts and the Palo Verde Irrigation District in rural California. Tha agreement allows as much as 29% of total farmland to be fallowed. Farmers like this approach. It’s been generally well received.
However, fallowing land does produce economic winners and losers. For example, vendors who sell seed or fertilizer lose out. And any jobs, communities, or segments of the world’s supply chain that rely on Western farmers growing lots of cow food in the middle of the desert lose out too.
But as water supplies continue to shrink, something has to give: in how we eat, what we grow, and where we grow it.
For the 17 Western states, the best solution to conserving water has to involve agriculture. There is simply no other place to get the water in significant enough quantities except from figuring out how to use less water to grow crops. Fallowing lands is one approach. Eating less meat and dairy is another. Growing crops in ways that drastically reduce water usage is another. No matter how we do it, the bulk of our water conservation has to come from reducing agriculture’s usage in whatever ways we can.
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