this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Animal feed is a huge category, vs. almonds. Almonds registering on that scale is what's so shocking about it.
Edit: Not that it isn't wasteful, if you need extra feed besides grazing, you're in trouble ecologically.
The water usage per liter of dairy milk is also higher. Per liter, dairy milk requires 628.2 L of freshwater vs almond milk requiring 371.46 L of freshwater. And if you use something like oat milk instead that gets you to 48.24 L.
https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks
Keep in mind here that 80% of the entire world's almonds are grown in California, so it's not surprising its a decent large user by size. Even despite that, just the mostly US demand for animal feed dwarfs water usage in California
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almonds_in_California
This is the mode important metric, thanks for including it