Water is essential to life — we all know this. Not only is it a necessary drink for pretty much all plant and animal species on Earth, but it is needed to produce virtually all food sources, too, among other essential and non-essential items we use every day. But, in our globalised world of mass production and consumption, it is used by humans in such vast amounts that future water security has been compromised. One particularly thirsty industry is dairy, the products of which are consumed by more than 6 billion people worldwide (wwf.org). According to One Green Planet (onegreenplanet.org), the global water footprint of animal agriculture is 2,422 billion cubic metres of water (one-fourth of the total global water footprint), 19 per cent of which is related to dairy cattle. A massive amount of water is required for cows to drink, for cleaning and cooling farm facilities, to mix calves’ milk-replacement and produce solid feed. In fact, the amount of water a dairy cow uses both directly and indirectly in one day could provide drinking water for one person for 22 years (medium.com).
Water for drinking
Since milk is about 87 per cent water, cows that are constantly producing milk need to be kept well hydrated. Profit-hungry farmers spend a lot of effort on this, as water directly affects the amount and quality of milk a cow produces — therefore, the money going into their pockets. A dairy cow needs at least 1,020 litres of water to produce just one litre of milk (vivahealth.org.uk), with lactating cows drinking at least 60 litres of water a day (ahdb.org.uk) and ‘high-performance dairy cows’ (those in factory farms producing massive quantities of ‘high-quality’ milk) drinking up to 150 litres of water each day (agrismart.co.uk). Astoundingly, agricultural solutions providers, Agri Smart recommends that water tanks inside dairy cow factory farms should supply 30-40 litres a minute, and that a single cow’s water bowl must supply above 20 litres a minute. To contemplate the amount being provided is overwhelming, but the more we look into it, the higher and scarier the numbers get.