It Takes 50,000 Litres of Water to Produce One Kilo of Beef

Lab-grown meat burger

We're living in an age of fake news and faux meat, if you follow the headlines.

In an encouraging trend, the recent rise of fake news has led to a new era of 'fact checking' by individuals and journalists, according to leading journalism website Poynter. "Around the globe fact-checking is "booming", Poynter recently wrote.

Simulated meat, on the other mitt, largely involves producing meat in a lab. Synthetic meat, test tube meat, cultured meat, meatless meat, institute-based meat, franken-meat, clean meat – call it what you lot will, it has been attracting some impressive investment backing from millionaires and giant meat companies in the past year, and with it, spiraling media interest.

It seems incongruous to anyone with a background in agronomics that something as natural as a cow eating grass could be considered a terrible thing for the planet, but that is a central premise upon which this new industry is beingness built.

What has been interesting in this era of simulated news and heightened sensitivity about the need for fact checking has been a noticeable trend that has been evidence in many articles about fake meat. That is, they nearly invariably repeat without credible demand for challenge the claims of the commercial proponents of simulated meat against real beef, presenting their views as incontrovertible truths near conventional agriculture without any show of attempting to verify the veracity of their claims.

Merely the reality is the information that is typically used to dorsum their claims is often far from incontrovertible or unchallengeable.

A recent Sydney Morning Herald article reporting on the global race to grow meat in labs explained that the tendency is seen every bit a way to produce protein in a more environmentally sustainable way.

In back up of that signal it quoted the Britain-based Institution of Mechanical Engineers, as saying one "kilogram of meat requires betwixt 5000 and 20,000 litres of water to produce, while one kilogram of wheat requires between 500 and 4000 litres of h2o".

Do these figures really hold water? Does it take as much as 20,000 litres of water produce a unmarried, lonely kilogram of beefiness? Or fifty-fifty as much every bit 5000 litres?

Lee McNicholl, a cattle producer from western Queensland, asked the same question earlier this calendar week.

These were his calculations: "Say a two year old grassfed steer dresses 300kg and Lean Meat Yield is 60 pct. Therefore 180kg of beef is produced. Say the fauna drinks 40 litres /twenty-four hour period (generous) for 730 days. That equals 29,200 litres divided by 180kg = 162 litres per kilogram.

A farther search showed the Institution of Mechanical Engineers fabricated the above argument in a 2013 report titled "Global Nutrient. Waste Non, Want Not".

However, while that statement was referenced in the report, the specific reference was missing from the list of references at the finish of the written report.

A spokesperson for the Institution kindly responded to our inquiry and told u.s.a. the source of the statement which was a 2008 magazine article produced by the Water Footprint Network, and written past the network'south founder, Professor Arjen Hoekstra, and also a UN written report referencing the aforementioned source.

In the commodity Professor Hoekstra actually wrote that producing i kilogram of boneless beef required about 155 litres of water, taking into account only the water used for drinking and servicing that animal.

However, when you added in 1300kg of grain, 7200kg of roughages (pasture, dry hay, silage and other roughages), and the water required to grow those feed sources, he said the water footprint of 1 kg of beefiness would add upwardly to 15,500 litres of h2o.

Professor Hoekstra, from the University of Twente in the netherlands, is the inventor of the Water Footprint concept, a method used to account for the total amount of water used to produce something.

This model is used widely in the ecology movement, only has also come up under serious challenge by others in the bookish customs about whether it is a fair and authentic way to measure bodily water use.

Simply comparison the water footprints of grain and meat does not provide helpful ecology information, water resource economist, and former caput of research at International H2o Management Constitute Dr Chris Perry wrote in a 2014 article in the Agronomical Water Management journal.

Dr Perry said calculation procedures adopted in most estimates of h2o footprints are flawed, and that h2o footprints are incorrectly assessed on an absolute rather than a relative ground.

A key concern was that 'Water Footprints' made no allowance for whether a producing area is h2o- plentiful or water-short.

"I must consider the scarcity or abundance of water and state, likewise every bit downstream h2o uses to evaluate the significance of whatever ecology impact when compared to the status of these variables in the absenteeism of grain or meat product. Simply comparing the water footprints of grain and meat does not provide helpful environmental information.

"It is overly simplistic and misleading to suggest that water footprints should be reduced without considering the context and purpose of water utilize."

"…Generalised h2o footprints are neither authentic nor helpful indicators for gaining a better agreement of water resource management."

Dr Perry's analysis would suggest that the source of the original 5000-20,000 litre claim is far from h2o-tight and one that should not stand solitary as incontrovertible truth.

Research led by the University of NSW in 2010, funded past Meat & Livestock Commonwealth of australia, found that water used to produce cherry-red meat in southern Australia was 180–540 L/kg of hot standard carcase weight.

The study's authors wrote: "We bear witness that for media claims that tens or hundreds of thousands of litres of water are used in the product of red meat to be true, analysts accept to ignore the environmental consequences of water use."

Peer reviewed enquiry published in Agricultural Systems using the Life Cycle Assessment model to quantify the environmental impacts of Australian beef production plant a 65 percent reduction in consumptive water utilise, from 1465 litres/kg of liveweight to 515 litres/kg of liveweight over the last 30 years, from 1981-2010.

Previous media articles take reported claims that it takes between 50,000 and 100,000 litres to produce a kilogram of cerise meat. But these reported measures count every single drib of water that falls on an area of land grazed by cattle over the infinite of a year. And they do not take into account the fact that nearly of the h2o ends upwards in waterways, is used by trees and plants and in pastures, non grazed past cattle. "These calculations therefore attribute all rain that falls on a property to beef product, whereby the water is clearly existence used for other purposes, such every bit supporting ecosystems" MLA explains in its Target 100 folio.

Not only do the claims of imitation meat advocates near real meat announced to go largely unchallenged, there likewise appears to be a scarcity of questions asked the detail of processes used to actually produce lab grown meat, and to abound and distribute information technology big volumes. More media attending on the actual environmental impacts or water footprints of commercialising and mass-producing this 'meat' would add of import perspective to the consequence.

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Source: https://www.beefcentral.com/news/does-it-really-take-20000l-of-water-to-produce-1kg-of-beef/

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