People for Reason in Science and Medicine
Pro-Health, Pro-Environment, Anti-Vivisection
Pro-Health, Pro-Environment, Anti-Vivisection
We all celebrated as the rains finally came down on Friday. What a welcome downpour that was! We hope we will get a repeat performance very soon. As people in southern California suffer through a massive heat wave and dwindling water supplies, we, who live in urban and suburban areas are being asked to take fewer showers, not to water our trees and flowers, let our lawns turn brown, install fake grass, and plant drought-resistant plants in our yards. This is deplorably unfair, unacceptable, and unnecessary. As global warming continues, and water becomes scarcer are we expected to live in post apocalypse-like communities where plants, flowers, and trees are nonexistent, and we take showers once a month?
According to One Green Planet and other reliable sources, 4 percent of water usage is personal, and 80 percent of our water goes to Big Ag. Food and Water Watch reports that agriculture uses an estimated 7.9 trillion gallons of water per year. One of the highest water users in California is the almond industry, a huge business in this state. Growing almonds, pistachios and walnuts uses at least 20 percent of California’s water. Almonds are grown on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley where the soil is very dry and difficult to irrigate and yet, beyond all common sense, almond production is rampant. “This water district (the Westlands Water District) pumped more than 1 million acre-feet of groundwater from 2015 to 2020 which is enough to provide everyone in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose and San Francisco with the recommended amount of daily water for more than two years. Inexplicably, under the Trump administration, the U.S. Department of the Interior awarded the Westlands Water District a massive, permanent water contract that, according to the Los Angeles Times, would provide the district with around twice as much water as is used by the 4 million residents of Los Angeles each year."
Beverly Hills billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick are one of the largest producers of almonds and pistachios in the world and contributed $250,000 to Governor Newsom’s campaign to defeat his recall. This is just one example of how water usage is at the mercy of political corruption.
Alfalfa crops use 16 percent of our water in California. It takes up one million irrigated acres and is grown in some of the driest areas in the state. 29 percent of of the crop is exported, making it a very lucrative business for Big Ag, while a large percentage remains in California as livestock feed. Unlike American farmers, Saudi Arabians figured out that the desert is no place to raise alfalfa, so they grow this and other crops in California and Arizona to send back to their country to feed their own dairy cows. Meanwhile water supplies here run dry. California’s dysfunctional water rights regulations adhere to this kind of insane corporate favoritism.
Taking into consideration the incredible amount of water needed to grow food for the animals, factory farming is the biggest user of water in California. It takes 142 million gallons of water a day just to run the mega dairies in the state. According to the USDA, as of January 2022, in California factory farms, there are 1.72 million dairy cows, 5,200,000 cattle, including calves, 125,000 goats, 575,000 sheep, including lambs, 6,000,000 turkeys, and an unnamed number of chickens. The amount of water spent by the factory farming industry is astronomical.
Taking into consideration the incredible amount of water needed to grow food for the animals, factory farming is the biggest user of water in California. It takes 142 million gallons of water a day just to run the mega dairies in the state. According to the USDA, as of January 2022, in California factory farms, there are 1.72 million dairy cows, 5,200,000 cattle, including calves, 125,000 goats, 575,000 sheep, including lambs, 6,000,000 turkeys, and an unnamed number of chickens. The amount of water spent by the factory farming industry is astronomical.
Producing one pound of animal protein requires 100 times more water than grain protein that goes directly to human consumption. Humans drink less than one gallon of water a day while a cow can drink 23 gallons a day. Besides the trillions of gallons of water that it takes to irrigate the fields of alfalfa and other feed crops, millions of gallons are used to wash excrement, and clean up the blood and grease from the equipment used to slaughter millions of animals who are then chopped into pieces before being shipped out to stores and sold as “food” to carnivores. One Green Planet estimates that producing just one pound of beef uses 1,600 gallons of water while the Water Education Foundation estimates that it’s more like 2,464 gallons. Either way it’s obvious that if we grow crops directly for human food, we could save hundreds of billions of gallons of water every year. Water parity is incredibly important but the horrific cruelty involved in factory farming is the best reason to abolish it.
Adding immensely to our drought problems is the fact that the oil and gas industry in just three years uses more than 3 billion gallons of fresh water for drilling operations, and that staggering amount adds up to 120 million showers for Californians. At the same time, they are constantly polluting our aquifers with toxic wastewater. According to Food and Water Watch “More than 80 percent of California’s new and active wells drilled by the oil and gas industry are in the Central Valley. And while families battle water shortages, the oil and gas industry is permitted to use and abuse the state’s limited water supplies to extract fossil fuels and profits at the public’s expense.”
In April of 2022 the California legislature had a chance to pass SB 2764 which would have prohibited expansion of any factory farm or large slaughterhouses in California. Led by pro AG Assembly Member Devon Mathis, the bill was killed in committee before it could even get out on the floor. SB 2764 could have done a lot to save billions of gallons of water, but even during a drought when citizens in California are asked to make huge sacrifices, the will of the Agriculture Lobby rules supreme. We already have witnessed in the past three years how California politicians are completely bought and paid for by the pharmaceutical industry, but Big Ag owns them as well. No amount of suffering by the citizens of California will cause politicians in Sacramento to vote against the billionaires who keep them in office, even if it means our state runs dry of groundwater and our lakes and rivers turn to dust.
What will it take to move politicians to protect our water resources and ignore pressure from Big Ag and oil companies? That remains to be seen. It seems like a herculean undertaking. But as conditions in California worsen and water shortages become impossible to ignore, pressure must be put on California legislators to pass regulations that improve water management and rid the system of corruption. At the federal level Senators Padilla and Feinstein and Speaker Pelosi need to do everything in their power to pass the Water Affordability, Transparency, Equity and Reliability Act that is languishing in Congress. It would “fully fund our water and wastewater system, put water systems back in the control of the public, help ensure water access and affordability, and restore the commitment of the federal government to protecting water.”
Meanwhile, the best solution is obvious – stop eating animals and animal products. If we put the factory farm industry out of business more than half our water shortage problems would be solved. Even though the solution is completely in our hands, many people prefer to turn a blind eye and thoughtlessly keep eating animals despite the damage it is doing to their health and environment. The facts are there. The numbers are there. Our water is being guzzled up by large industries that care nothing about water conservation. We who live in California and have no intention of leaving the state and handing over our water, natural resources, and our fish and wildlife to billionaires will stay and fight. But the best thing everyone can possibly do for this embattled state is to eat plant-based food. No one can stop you from doing that one very important thing.
