Re: [FRIAM] My biggest complaint about ethanol as automobile fuel

[Bill Eldridge]

Steve Smith wrote: Sorry to switch subjects, but from Steve Boyan: I was wrong. If I had known that for every pound of beef I did not eat, I would save anywhere from 2,500 to 5,000 gallons of water, I would have been moved. Why doesn't a pound of beef cost more than 2500 gallons of water? Wouldn't ADM (or whoever cares for the cow) have to pay for that much water? To make a profit, wouldn't they have to charge more than their costs? Or get subsidized to overcome their losses. A few Web stats, no big effort made to make these all fit together. 2500-5000 gallons of water? Much of which fell from the sky onto the grazing pastures and/or field crops that the cows ate perhaps? I'm not believing that raising cattle on feed lots is a sane way to feed ourselves, but that doesn't mean these numbers can be taken at face value. This is not 2500-5000 1 gallon jugs from the grocery, nor from the same tap that you or I drink and wash from. On the topic of public grazing lands, a great deal of that grazing is limited to yearling cattle who are then taken to feed lots for the bulk of their growth/fattening. I'm not sure of the numbers around managing these lands but I suspect other uses of the land were made as well ( a lot of grazing is done where timber and mining and recreation are also involved). Maybe this is taken into account, but none of us trust uncontextualized statistics do we? I noted that I thought the 2500-5000 gallons/pound sounded exaggerated, and isn't referenced, but the subsidies information for livestock is more exact, while Mike Oliker's info on water price differences between agricultural/livestock usage and metro human use caps it off. In short, we subsidize cattle in a number of ways, from public lands to cheap water to corn and grain subsidies for cheap feed.

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