Land Required Per Kg of Beef
Lab-grown meat burger
We're living in an age of fake news and fake meat, if you follow the headlines.
In an encouraging tendency, 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 world fact-checking is "booming", Poynter recently wrote.
Fake meat, on the other hand, largely involves producing meat in a lab. Synthetic meat, test tube meat, cultured meat, meatless meat, plant-based meat, franken-meat, clean meat – call it what you will, information technology has been attracting some impressive investment bankroll from millionaires and giant meat companies in the past twelvemonth, and with information technology, spiraling media interest.
Information technology seems incongruous to anyone with a background in agronomics that something as natural every bit a cow eating grass could be considered a terrible affair for the planet, but that is a key premise upon which this new manufacture is being built.
What has been interesting in this era of imitation news and heightened sensitivity virtually the need for fact checking has been a noticeable trend that has been show in many articles about fake meat. That is, they almost invariably repeat without apparent need for claiming the claims of the commercial proponents of faux meat against existent beef, presenting their views equally incontrovertible truths about conventional agriculture without whatsoever evidence of attempting to verify the veracity of their claims.
But the reality is the information that is typically used to back 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 trend is seen equally a way to produce protein in a more environmentally sustainable style.
In support of that point it quoted the UK-based Establishment of Mechanical Engineers, as saying ane "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 water".
Practice these figures actually concord h2o? Does it accept as much every bit 20,000 litres of water produce a single, solitary kilogram of beef? Or even equally much as 5000 litres?
Lee McNicholl, a cattle producer from western Queensland, asked the aforementioned question before this week.
These were his calculations: "Say a two year onetime grassfed steer dresses 300kg and Lean Meat Yield is 60 pct. Therefore 180kg of beef is produced. Say the fauna drinks twoscore litres /twenty-four hours (generous) for 730 days. That equals 29,200 litres divided by 180kg = 162 litres per kilogram.
A further search showed the Institution of Mechanical Engineers fabricated the higher up statement in a 2013 report titled "Global Food. Waste Non, Want Not".
However, while that argument was referenced in the written report, the specific reference was missing from the listing of references at the end of the report.
A spokesperson for the Institution kindly responded to our enquiry and told united states of america the source of the statement which was a 2008 magazine article produced past the Water Footprint Network, and written past the network'south founder, Professor Arjen Hoekstra, and also a United nations study referencing the aforementioned source.
In the article Professor Hoekstra actually wrote that producing one kilogram of boneless beef required about 155 litres of water, taking into account only the water used for drinking and servicing that beast.
However, when you lot added in 1300kg of grain, 7200kg of roughages (pasture, dry hay, silage and other roughages), and the water required to abound those feed sources, he said the water footprint of 1 kg of beef would add together up to 15,500 litres of water.
Professor Hoekstra, from the University of Twente in the Netherlands, is the inventor of the Water Footprint concept, a method used to business relationship for the full amount of water used to produce something.
This model is used widely in the environmental movement, only has besides come under serious challenge by others in the bookish community about whether it is a fair and accurate way to measure out bodily water use.
Only comparing the water footprints of grain and meat does not provide helpful ecology data, water resource economist, and sometime head of inquiry at International Water Management Institute Dr Chris Perry wrote in a 2014 commodity in the Agricultural Water Management journal.
Dr Perry said calculation procedures adopted in most estimates of h2o footprints are flawed, and that water footprints are incorrectly assessed on an absolute rather than a relative basis.
A primal concern was that 'Water Footprints' made no allowance for whether a producing area is water- plentiful or h2o-short.
"1 must consider the scarcity or abundance of h2o and land, too as downstream h2o uses to evaluate the significance of any environmental affect when compared to the status of these variables in the absenteeism of grain or meat product. Merely comparing the water footprints of grain and meat does not provide helpful environmental data.
"It is overly simplistic and misleading to suggest that water footprints should be reduced without considering the context and purpose of h2o use."
"…Generalised water footprints are neither accurate nor helpful indicators for gaining a better understanding of water resource management."
Dr Perry's analysis would propose that the source of the original 5000-xx,000 litre claim is far from water-tight and i that should not stand lonely as incontrovertible truth.
Inquiry led past the University of NSW in 2010, funded by Meat & Livestock Commonwealth of australia, plant that water used to produce red meat in southern Commonwealth of australia was 180–540 50/kg of hot standard carcase weight.
The report'southward authors wrote: "Nosotros show that for media claims that tens or hundreds of thousands of litres of water are used in the production of red meat to be true, analysts take to ignore the ecology consequences of water apply."
Peer reviewed research published in Agronomical Systems using the Life Bike Cess model to quantify the environmental impacts of Australian beef product found a 65 per centum reduction in consumptive water use, from 1465 litres/kg of liveweight to 515 litres/kg of liveweight over the last 30 years, from 1981-2010.
Previous media articles have reported claims that information technology takes between 50,000 and 100,000 litres to produce a kilogram of red meat. Simply these reported measures count every single driblet of h2o that falls on an area of land grazed by cattle over the space of a year. And they exercise not take into business relationship the fact that most of the water ends upward in waterways, is used by trees and plants and in pastures, not grazed by cattle. "These calculations therefore attribute all rain that falls on a property to beef production, whereby the water is clearly being used for other purposes, such as supporting ecosystems" MLA explains in its Target 100 page.
Not merely practice the claims of simulated meat advocates virtually real meat appear to go largely unchallenged, there also appears to exist a scarcity of questions asked the item of processes used to actually produce lab grown meat, and to abound and distribute it large volumes. More than media attention on the actual environmental impacts or h2o footprints of commercialising and mass-producing this 'meat' would add together important 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/