it would be a tremendous help overall if people cut meat consumption dramatically...
Although California produces nearly half of the fruit and vegetables grown in the U.S., when the water usage stats for these crops are compared to the amount of water needed to produce animal products, one can clearly see who the water guzzlers are. Pork consumes 121,000 gallons of blue water per ton of meat produced; beef, about 145,000 gallons per ton; and butter uses some 122,800 gallons per ton...
Surprisingly though, leading California’s water consumption comes from a single plant — alfalfa. The majority of alfalfa is not grown for human consumption but to feed livestock. Over a million acres of California land and tons of blue water is used to cultivate alfalfa, which is fed to beef and dairy cattle.…the alfalfa is not even being consumed by livestock here in the U.S., it’s being shipped to Asia. “Alfalfa growers are now exporting some 100 billion gallons of water a year from this drought-ridden region to the other side of the world in the form of alfalfa...
When Robert Glennon... author of the book Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What to Do About It, first learned that the U.S. was exporting alfalfa crops that had been grown with the very limited western irrigation water, his reaction was "utter disbelief."
Glennon crunched some numbers and figured that in 2012, roughly 50 billion gallons of western water—enough to supply the annual household needs of half a million families—were exported to China. Not literally bottled up and shipped, but embedded in alfalfa crops grown with irrigation water. And that's just to China, which still trails Japan and the United Arab Emirates as a top destination for American alfalfa....The concept of exporting "virtual water" is not new. And for decades the United States has exported trillions of gallons of it.
According to a UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education report published in 2011, the United States exports more than twice as much virtual water, about 82 trillion gallons, as any other country. That's largely because American farms feed the whole world.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/01/140123-colorado-river-water-alfalfa-hay-farming-export-asia/
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