What Does 1 Kg Beef Look Like

Lab-grown meat burger

We're living in an age of fake news and fake meat, if you follow the headlines.

In an encouraging trend, the contempo rise of fake news has led to a new era of 'fact checking' by individuals and journalists, according to leading journalism website Poynter. "Around the world fact-checking is "booming", Poynter recently wrote.

Fake meat, on the other hand, largely involves producing meat in a lab. Constructed meat, test tube meat, cultured meat, meatless meat, plant-based meat, franken-meat, clean meat – call it what you will, it has been attracting some impressive investment backing from millionaires and giant meat companies in the past year, and with it, spiraling media interest.

Information technology seems incongruous to anyone with a background in agriculture that something every bit natural as a cow eating grass could be considered a terrible matter for the planet, merely that is a central premise upon which this new industry is being built.

What has been interesting in this era of fake news and heightened sensitivity about the need for fact checking has been a noticeable tendency that has been show in many articles about fake meat. That is, they almost invariably repeat without apparent demand for claiming the claims of the commercial proponents of simulated meat confronting real beef, presenting their views as incontrovertible truths about conventional agriculture without whatsoever evidence of attempting to verify the veracity of their claims.

But the reality is the information that is typically used to back their claims is oft far from incontrovertible or unchallengeable.

A recent Sydney Morning Herald article reporting on the global race to grow meat in labs explained that the tendency is seen as a way to produce protein in a more environmentally sustainable manner.

In support of that signal it quoted the Britain-based Institution of Mechanical Engineers, as proverb one "kilogram of meat requires betwixt 5000 and twenty,000 litres of water to produce, while one kilogram of wheat requires between 500 and 4000 litres of h2o".

Do these figures actually hold water? Does it take as much as 20,000 litres of h2o produce a single, solitary kilogram of beef? Or fifty-fifty equally much every bit 5000 litres?

Lee McNicholl, a cattle producer from western Queensland, asked the same question before this week.

These were his calculations: "Say a two year one-time grassfed steer dresses 300kg and Lean Meat Yield is sixty percent. Therefore 180kg of beef is produced. Say the animal drinks xl litres /twenty-four hours (generous) for 730 days. That equals 29,200 litres divided by 180kg = 162 litres per kilogram.

A further search showed the Institution of Mechanical Engineers made the above statement in a 2013 report titled "Global Food. Waste matter Non, Desire Not".

Nonetheless, while that argument was referenced in the report, the specific reference was missing from the list of references at the end of the report.

A spokesperson for the Establishment kindly responded to our inquiry and told united states the source of the argument which was a 2008 magazine article produced by the Water Footprint Network, and written by the network'south founder, Professor Arjen Hoekstra, and as well a Un report referencing the same source.

In the article Professor Hoekstra actually wrote that producing one kilogram of boneless beefiness required about 155 litres of water, taking into business relationship merely the h2o used for drinking and servicing that animal.

Yet, when you added in 1300kg of grain, 7200kg of roughages (pasture, dry hay, silage and other roughages), and the water required to grow those feed sources, he said the water footprint of i kg of beef would add upward to 15,500 litres of h2o.

Professor Hoekstra, from the University of Twente in the Netherlands, is the inventor of the Water Footprint concept, a method used to account for the total amount of water used to produce something.

This model is used widely in the environmental move, but has likewise come up under serious claiming by others in the academic community nigh whether it is a fair and accurate manner to measure out actual water use.

Simply comparing the water footprints of grain and meat does not provide helpful environmental information, water resource economist, and former head of research at International Water Direction Institute Dr Chris Perry wrote in a 2014 article in the Agronomical Water Management journal.

Dr Perry said calculation procedures adopted in near estimates of water footprints are flawed, and that h2o footprints are incorrectly assessed on an absolute rather than a relative basis.

A key business organisation was that 'H2o Footprints' fabricated no allowance for whether a producing area is h2o- plentiful or water-short.

"1 must consider the scarcity or abundance of h2o and land, as well as downstream h2o uses to evaluate the significance of any environmental impact when compared to the status of these variables in the absenteeism of grain or meat production. Simply comparing the water footprints of grain and meat does not provide helpful ecology information.

"It is overly simplistic and misleading to suggest that water footprints should be reduced without considering the context and purpose of water employ."

"…Generalised water footprints are neither authentic nor helpful indicators for gaining a amend understanding of water resource management."

Dr Perry's analysis would suggest that the source of the original 5000-20,000 litre claim is far from water-tight and i that should not stand up lone as incontrovertible truth.

Research led by the Academy of NSW in 2010, funded by Meat & Livestock Australia, found that water used to produce red meat in southern Australia was 180–540 Fifty/kg of hot standard carcase weight.

The study's authors wrote: "We show that for media claims that tens or hundreds of thousands of litres of water are used in the production of red meat to be true, analysts have to ignore the ecology consequences of water use."

Peer reviewed research published in Agricultural Systems using the Life Cycle Assessment model to quantify the environmental impacts of Australian beef product constitute a 65 percent reduction in consumptive water use, from 1465 litres/kg of liveweight to 515 litres/kg of liveweight over the last 30 years, from 1981-2010.

Previous media manufactures accept reported claims that it takes betwixt l,000 and 100,000 litres to produce a kilogram of reddish meat. But these reported measures count every single drop of water that falls on an area of state grazed past cattle over the space of a year. And they do non take into account the fact that most of the water ends upwards in waterways, is used by copse and plants and in pastures, not grazed by cattle. "These calculations therefore attribute all rain that falls on a property to beef production, whereby the water is clearly existence used for other purposes, such as supporting ecosystems" MLA explains in its Target 100 page.

Not only exercise the claims of faux meat advocates nearly real meat announced to go largely unchallenged, in that location also appears to be a scarcity of questions asked the detail of processes used to actually produce lab grown meat, and to grow and distribute it big volumes. More media attending on the actual environmental impacts or water footprints of commercialising and mass-producing this 'meat' would add important perspective to the event.

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Source: https://www.beefcentral.com/news/does-it-really-take-20000l-of-water-to-produce-1kg-of-beef/

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