Counting the water needed to grow the animal's feed, roughly how many litres of water does it take to produce one kilogram of beef?
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Answer
About 15,000 litres
The great majority of that water is rain falling on pasture and feed crops, not water drawn from taps or rivers.
How to estimate it
Cattle need about 8 kg of feed to gain 1 kg of live weight, and only 40 percent of the animal ends up as meat, so 1 kg of beef takes 8 / 0.4 = 20 kg of feed. Growing 1 kg of grass or grain uses about 700 litres of water, mostly rain. 20 × 700 = 14,000 litres. The commonly cited global average is about 15,000 litres.
Source: Water Footprint Network (Mekonnen and Hoekstra)
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