It Takes HOW Much Water to Make Greek Yogurt?!

Dairy products require a whole lot of water—and many of them come from drought-ridden California.


California is experiencing one of its driest years in the past half millennium. It also happens to also be the country’s leading dairy supplier. With profits surpassing $7 billion in 2012, the California dairy industry is far and away the most valuable sector of the state’s enormous agricultural bounty. Unfortunately, as the chart above shows, dairy products use a whole lot of water.

Why is our dairy so thirsty? According to a 2012 study in the journal Ecosystems by Mesfin Mekonnen and Arjen Hoekstra, 98 percent of milk’s water footprint comes from cows’ food.

Now, cattle eat all sorts of things, but a dairy cow’s diet in the United States consists primarily of alfalfa hay, grass hay, corn, and other grains like soy or canola. Alfalfa hay is a superfood of sorts for dairy cows—it’s high in protein, high in energy, and it’s digestible. “When you feed alfalfa, you produce more milk,” says Dan Putnam, a plant scientist at the University of California-Davis. “That’s the bottom line.” In a University of California alfalfa blog (yes, that exists), Putnam and his colleague wrote, “The next time you have pizza (with cheese), milk on your cereal, or ice cream, thank alfalfa.”

Putnam used a University of Wisconsin study to estimate the amount of milk an acre of alfalfa hay can to produce in a year. If you consider Putnam’s calculations and the California Department of Water Resources’ statistics on the yield of an acre of alfalfa, the water footprint of a gallon of milk looks something like this:

Given the size of the state’s dairy industry, it may come as no surprise that, as of 2010, alfalfa led the state’s crops in total water consumption and was a close second in total irrigated crop area. Here are some of the other top water users:

water chart

The vast majority of alfalfa grown in California is fed to California’s cows, but as the New York Times recently reported, some of the state’s alfalfa hayPutnam estimates about 10 percentis shipped abroad, where farmers can reap higher profits.

?Unfortunately, the water footprint of meat products is even bigger than that of dairy. According to another study by Mekonnen and Hoekstra, it takes a total of 425 gallons of water to produce a four-ounce serving of beef in the United States. The same size serving of pork takes 165 gallons of water; for chicken, 66 gallons. 

The same New York Times piece suggests that replacing half of the animal products in your diet with plant-based substitutes reduces your food-related water footprint by 30 percent. Going vegetarian reduces it by 60 percent.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate