Seriously the way people talk about this is rather infuriating sometimes
we live in a societyWater consumption is an absolut shit metric for environmental impacts. Rain doesnt disappear because it falls on a field or a pasture. These studies almost never make a difference between water that simply stays in the cycle and water that gets removed from it, by pollution or because its shipped away and only some field fruits in some regions require artificial sprinkling.
The question is whether its usefull to feed massive amounts of food to animals to than harvest their products and to which extant this is wastefull. Plus all the problems of intense cattle farming, like methan production and dealing with the manure.
Almonds in the US are almost exclusively produced in arid southern California and require extensive irrigation from non-renewable groundwater resources or diversions from an already struggling Colorado River
Cattle farming is also there and the main drainer of the Colorado River
Correspondingly, our hydrologic modelling reveals that cattle-feed irrigation is the leading driver of flow depletion in one-third of all western US sub-watersheds; cattle-feed irrigation accounts for an average of 75% of all consumptive use in these 369 sub-watersheds. During drought years (that is, the driest 10% of years), more than one-quarter of all rivers in the western US are depleted by more than 75% during summer months (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Fig. 2) and cattle-feed irrigation is the largest water use in more than half of these heavily depleted rivers
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=wffdocs
Which makes their water consumption a problem, because in that specific agricultral environment they need more water than whats available which has not much to do with their overall water consumption (like strawberries from spain).
Right, and our free range, regenerative, sustainably rotated cows only get their water by holding their mouths up to the rain so as not to harm our water supply.
If you have a low intensity cow pasture, meaning a few 100 animals on square km, thats not going to effect the water supply in most regions.
And how many litres of milk do these low intensity cow pastures produce? Is it a significant amount of the milk consumed or is it meaningless distraction? What portion of dairy instead comes from feed also grown in places with water scarcity?
I never made statement on the current sustainability of the global milk industry. I merely said, that there are ways of cattle farming with low impacts on the local water supply.
In fact if you would have bothered to read my previous post before going nuclear, you could have seen that I am well aware of the problems of industrial animal farming.
And there are ways of making plant based milks that are far, far lower impact than even the lowest impact animal agriculture. Attacking unsustainable plant milk production because slightly less unsustainable animal agriculture exists when actual sustainable plant milk production exists is just downright bizarre, especially when the niche animal agriculture doesn't scale and is taking up a frankly absurd amount of land.
I'm sorry that you perceive this conversation as "going nuclear." I don't care about your history, I care about what you're saying right here right now.
They don’t read. They believe whatever the tech bros sell them.
Didn’t you hear? The tech bros will save everyone with vertical farms in robotic AI driven skyscrapers made from carbon negative concrete, growing artificial meat from bacteria on spinach lattice and milk from almond trees.
All with 120% water efficiency and zero mass inputs except raw sewage, hobo corpses, and used plastic.
All powered by thorium hybridized IC fusion, three solar paneled windows, and exercise bikes awarding bitcoin.
Totally reasonable. Nothing has to change, but abandon every solution that won’t scale to ecumenopolis size levels.
/s
Where do these "low intensity" ranches get freshwater for their animals?
So it doesnt rain in where you live huh?
Ahh, so the "low intensity" ranches also have cattle that open their mouths to the sky & drink from the rain. That's very neat
Low intensity is when cattle are reared in a countries that has a naturally high rain fall and grasslands grow without fertiliser. Like the UK. Do you acknowledge OPs data doesn’t apply to UK because of the incredibly small amount of input needed from the farmer? You stick some cows in a field with an old bath tub to collect rain water. And occasionally you have a vet come down for any health issue. So no the cows don’t look to the sky and open their mouth. The rain water collects in a vessel in the field and they drink from there.
But nice attempt at a straw man. Would you like me to start sending you google maps of bathtubs in fields in England that cows drink from? There a ducking thousands of them.
It has a lot to do with their overall water consumption?? 85% of the water consumption of the Colorado River is agriculture. The majority of that is almonds and alfalfa. The remaining 15% supports all industries in and about 30 million people.
The current way water is distributed is through water rights which have priority from the time they are created, most of the farmers have older water rights than cities such as San Fransico, at our current rate and under our current legal interpretations of water law we could see people having to move due to lack of water.
But thats exactly my point water consumption of almond agriculture is a problem, because in this specific case there isnt enough water.
It makes no sense to compare to methods of agricultural production solely by their water consumption, you need a context for this metric, which means its only usefull in a case to case comparison, not as an overall fast way to determine whether its bad for the environment.
You are right that if an area receives enough rainfall a high water consumption does not matter, but in the United States the vast majority happens in arid areas that rely on unsustainable groundwater consumption. The biggest "villians" are alfalfa and corn used for animal feed. They require the most water per acre and are low profit so have to be grown on very large scales.
Secondly, a lot of crops like long stretches of warm weather. If almonds cannot be farmed on a large scale anywhere they can grow because of this.
Somehow I doubt that the largest global producer of agricultural products is wholly dependent on irrigation. In a country that can mostly be considered as humid or semi humid.
If you genuinely care about the Colorado River, here are some numbers for you:
"What’s not normal about the Colorado River, however, is that an enormous portion, as much as 70 percent, of the water devoted to agriculture goes to just two crops—alfalfa and grass—to make hay. When you do the math, this means that more than half the water siphoned from the Colorado River is used to grow food for beef and dairy cattle, as well as for some sheep and horses."
Also, California grows upwards of 80% of the WORLD'S almonds. I can guarantee you they are being used for more than just Almond Milk. 🤷♂️
Yes, and as a Californian, we should use dairy-milk because that is produced in places with more plentiful water.
Not necessarily, most milk is produced in CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) essentially thousands of cows kept indoors. It requires a lot of feed grown in arid areas that are also unsustainably using ground water
As long as that place is a foreign state like Wisconsin that’s fine by me.
a great example of why 7 billion vegans with our business as usual model is not sustainable.
veganism is more efficient, but it isn't the solution to our shitty economic paradigm
Well alfalfa is about 60% of that 85% water use and it is almost entirely used for animal feed. It is one of the most water intensive crops. If we were to stop alfalfa farming it would solve southern California's water crisis overnight, even if we kept the almonds.
Edit: per my other comment the Colorado River water withdraws are about 85% for Ag, 15% for industrial and municipal uses
Additionally, facing a 30% shortfall
I dream of Great Plains farms that are using fossil converted to free range bison ranches. Restore Great Plains ecosystems, produce high quality protein, stop using fossil water. Probably better than any farming.
And it would be very expensive to buy
The meat? Not really. Bison meat is available now and it's not eye wateringly expensive. Mass scale ranching bison *check notes* in their native environment, where they don't need any extra fodder or water isn't likely to be that costly.
It's hugely inefficient compared to factory farming
space inefficient. Water and good efficient.
What about time
that's a nice dream
sadly humanity will probably just go back to shooting them for fun because we suck
Which is why SoCal needs to STOP almond farming😂😂
Or at least decrease it. Other areas can take up the slack.
Fr. Like any area with a climate that almonds grow easily in.
Whilst milk is locally produced so its environmental impact changes based on local conditions. For example my homeland is high in pasture land and marches with a large level of rainfall per person. And we import almonds.
So in terms of environmental impact locally produced milk is significantly better then foreign import almond milk.
Well it depends, cows being the largest producer of methane complicates things. Methane is about 8x as potent as CO2 kg/kg. Not requiring growing feed that need irrigation is a plus, but pastures are not the carbon sinks they could be with an ecosystem of grass that is not allowed to grow. Local/organic agriculture can also be less efficient in terms of CO2 output per calorie, as transportation of goods is less efficient on a smaller scale due to economy of scale. They often provide less calories per acre as well compared to industrial farming with GMO crops that are designed to requires less water/be resistant to pests and diseases
And unless you advocate for their culling they would still exist. Still produce milk. Of course factory farming especially increases their population multiplicatively but those animals still will exist and would need to live on farms (thanks to the selective breeding techniques used over the centuries)
I mean, the only option isn't just to go shoot them all in the head lol, they could begin being bred below their replacement rate, and their population would naturally decrease. I am also not saying that we should not have any cows, but let's not beat around the bush thinking that this is beneficial to the environment in any way.
That said, I do eat meat and consume dairy, I just try not to lie to myself that these things do not have a much larger impact on the environment than other diets.
That's still culling, and the way cows are ATM they need to be milked. That industry might be non beneficial but short of execution it is less environmentally damaging.
I also don't pretend that it is, I know meat is a bad for the environment, but importing almond milk from the other side of the world is worse then using the milk, the harvesting of which is required for the ethical treatment of cows.
Almond milk isn't the only dairy alternative. And it's not like they ship the finished milk to other countries, just the almonds
Well I personally like the countryside with the animals in place, if you want to argue that milk produces too much emissions then fair, but your killing, or "depopulating" the cows to achieve that goal.
Since I actually like seeing the animals and the countryside then I consider it a 0 sum game.
It’s totally an option to just not breed more. Dairy cows are slaughtered anyway once their milk production declines, usually around 5 years old. Unless we really see demand for dairy dropping to nothing in less than that timespan, having a bunch of leftover cows isn’t a realistic concern. Plus it’s disingenuous to make it sound like culling would be some tragedy when they will almost all eventually be killed anyway
The issue is that you would be getting rid of them. As in as a species, short of zoos or other reserves. I disagree with that concept.
It still takes a lot of blue water for animal feed
One graph even has California's animal feed water usage so large it actually goes off the chart at 15.2 million acre-feet of water (it is distorted to make it fit as it notes). For some comparison, the blue water usage of animal feed is larger than all of almonds water usage (green or blue) of ~2 million acre-feet of water
https://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ca_ftprint_full_report3.pdf#page=25
The more liquid the end product is, the more of that water is leaving the area.
Mostly dry grains vs a literal liquid product
It’s not just the water that leave the region in the products, crucial chemicals in the soil can leave the region too.
But are we talking about relevant amounts of liquid that leave the area? As for minerals we luckily developed fertilizer to offset this problem.
The question is whether its usefull to feed massive amounts of food to animals to than harvest their products and to which extant this is wastefull
A critical input to this calculus is what the animals are being fed. People don't raise animals to eat that compete with us for food. That wouldn't make sense. We raise animals that eat things we don't eat. Cattle mostly eat grass, hay, and agricultural waste.
The question isn't "should we feed animals?" The question is "in this new civilization ecology (made up of mostly 2 new kinds of ecosystem: farms and cities) should humans be the only large vertebrates?" Every other ecosystem has a large variety of large vertebrates that serve different ecological niches. Man-made ecosystems seem to follow this rule.
And imo oat milk is better tasting
Oat milk is the best. And the tastiest.
Oat milk gives me heinous IBS.
I just drink my coffee black now.
True coffee enjoyers drink it black anyway.
Despite the stomach cramps, teeth staining, and immediate need to rush a toilet.
Between that, the red wine and the cigarettes I'm just accepting that I'm gonna be a bit yellow in the teeth department. May actually consider getting them whitened at some point.
Stomach cramps and rush to the toilet happens when I drink oat milk, not so much with espresso.
Stomach cramps and rush to the toilet happens when I drink oat milk, not so much with espresso.
Huh so funny it's the opposite for me 🙃
Yeah I don't smoke (tobacco at least) bit I drink much coffee everyday and love me some wine... my teeth are gonna yellow too probably..
Ah fuck it tho. Pearly White teeth are creepy anyway.
My teeth started yellow, what with the childhood fluorosis. It’s whatever.
I’m just lucky I’m not also totally snaggletoothed.
I only drink oat milk cause it is what I enjoy the taste of the most, but it's good to know it is the best for the environment as well. I will proceed to not fact check your statement, and feel morally superior about a consumption decision that has nothing to do with morality, and everything with it being the tastiest choice.
Based.
oat is actually somewhere around a tie to very slightly worse than soy for sustainibility but it's a very close thing. Oat is the clear winner in terms of taste though. even if I have the option of a dairy pill to have real milk I now just prefer oat.
Soy tastes horrid to me, so yea, full agreement.
Oak milk tastes like a sweater
you're drinking the wrong brand then. at a guess probably silk? that shit is awful tastes like I'm drinking liquified cardboard.
What are good brands cause the 3 I’ve had all tasted like I was eating the carton.
I like earth's own but it sounds like it might just not be for you
I’ll try it but you may be right.
At the very least you might like their chocolate oat milk. It's very good
Unflavored and unsweetened is great for thickening sauces like milk but without adding all that sugar.
Mommy almond milkers
FUCK DAIRY
FUCK ALMOND MILK
FUCK MILK ALTERNATIVES
TRUE ENVIRONMENTALISTS DRINK PUDDLE WATER
If you haven't contracted giardia, can you really say you love the earth?
Soy Milk just tastes better
User deleted comment
17d
except it still hasn't given me the tits i was promised
Almonds are really bad. They're intense on water usage while also often cultivated in areas where the supply of freshwater is already strained. It is better than dairy but if you have any other non-dairy option it is better to take it than to drink almond milk.
It's also not the tastiest non-dairy milk, I really don't quite understand why people choose it. I just find it so thin. Soy and oat are superior by MILES in my book.
Reminds me of how people talk about the environmental cost of rare earth mining for wind turbines and solar panels as an excuse to keep burning coal and oil.
Okay, but unless you're allergic to soy, just drink soy milk. So many people refuse to drink it because of the pervasive and false rumor that soy causes physical feminization.
It's only 50p a litre here too, cheaper than dairy milk
Exactly. It's bomb, good for you, and cheap.
You don't drink almond milk because of its environmental impact.
I don't drink almond milk because it's yucky.
We are not the same.
Same with avocados.
Can we not just like, focus on more important things than milk?
I get the emissions from cows, sure, but maybe focus more on the amount of meat people eat. One cow can make liters upon liters of milk, but steak? You only get a few of those
Fuck almonds. All my environmentally conscious homies hate almonds
Are they that bad?
They take a lot of water, which is fine if you grow them somewhere with lots of water. But we grow them in California and that's bad (this happens because farmers in California get their water for free and have no incentive to conserve it, if farmers had to pay a market price they would grow a different crop)
Aah I see, so it's like Avocados, they have their place, but being mass produced it becomes overbearing on water resources.
Right, and it depends a lot where you grow them, and we’re currently growing them in a bad place
That's true but your solution is flawed. California grows a ridiculous amount of stuff and making the farmers pay for all the water they use would dramatically reduce production and basically only a few subsidized crops would be seen as worth the effort, so you would be left with soy and corn, basically, so it would be better to just limit the total water they could use for free so they have an incentive not to go over that, but they aren't financially crippled by needing to shoulder the cost of so much agriculture
Trains are harsher for the environment than riding a bike, so we should drive all trains off a big cliff
Not really the same, since they’re both better than cars and the post is saying almond milk is still better than diary.
I think that was their point it was sarcasm
Idk, they were definitely sarcastic but it didn’t seem like they agreed with the OP
Mood
almond milk also tastes like paper, oat milk is the best plant milk imo
Can also just not drink milk like most adults
More importantly: Almond milk tastes much worse than other non-dairy milks.
I use oat milk because they grow oats in my country. Almonds have to be transported thousands of miles to where I live.
If you live in Cali, almond milk is probably the best overall option in terms of combined carbon footprint, land use and water.
Don't tell em about Chocolate, or Coffee.
Wow I always thought it was soy because of how much deforestation is required for soy products, but yeah it takes the least amount of water but somehow only uses a little more emissions, do those emissions account for the deforestation? Also Almonds give the least emissions, which is even more important to consider. The real problem is I have diary to get protein so what’s the point of almond milk other than it tasting good.
Less than 10% of soy is consumed by humans. 80% is directly eaten by animals as livestock feed, 10% is used for industrial oils, and 10% is all of the human used edible tofu and soy milk in the world.
Soy is an amazing crops, feeding over 150 billion large land mammals a year to satiate humanities greed for flesh and inefficient milk is the problem, not soy.
For some numbers to this post:
Per liter, dairy milk requires 628.2 L of freshwater vs almond milk requiring 371.46 L of freshwater. And if you use something like oat milk instead that gets you to 48.24 L
https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks
EDIT: also to mention that cattle farming from dairy and beef are also grown in arid areas and use a lot of irrigation there. The leading drain of the Colorado River is cattle farming
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=wffdocs
One graph even has California's animal feed water usage so large it actually goes off the chart at 15.2 million acre-feet of water (it is distorted to make it fit as it notes). For some comparison, the blue water usage of animal feed is larger than all of almonds water usage of ~2 million acre-feet of water
https://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ca_ftprint_full_report3.pdf#page=25