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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • 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)

    2022                  1000 pounds  metric ton              m3 water usage
    Almonds (with shell)  2565000      1163476.36759503        9362494330.0372
    Butter                685953       311146.239680668        1346018632.85857
    Cheese                2460538      1116092.71523179        4402985761.5894
    Sour Cream            199309       90405.9693368412
    Yogurt                377839       171386.646103602
    Milk Nonfat           860246       390205.02585503
    Milk condensed        108237       49095.9811303638
    Dry Buttermilk        60090        27256.6451964075
    Ice Cream             77939        35352.8984849859
    Lowfat Ice cream      36140        16392.9964619432
    Cattle Calves         2197765      996899.664338202        20154320513.9254
     
    Water use (m3 /ton)   green        blue              grey  total
    Milk                  647          60                89    796
    Butter                3519         324               483   4326
    Milk Powder           3007         277               413   3697
    Cheese                3196         310               439   3945
    Almonds (with shell)  4632         1908              1507  8047
    Beef                  19102        525               590   20217
     
    References:
    https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/PDFs/2022_Exports_Publication.pdf
    https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/PDFs/2022-2023_california_agricultural_statistics_review.pdf
    https://www.waterfootprint.org/resources/Report-48-WaterFootprint-AnimalProducts-Vol1.pdf
    https://waterfootprint.org/resources/Report47-WaterFootprintCrops-Vol1.pdf
    


  • I see, for anyone else here is the definition from the HTA

    “highway” includes a common and public highway, street, avenue, parkway, driveway, square, place, bridge, viaduct or trestle, any part of which is intended for or used by the general public for the passage of vehicles and includes the area between the lateral property lines thereof; (“voie publique”)