animals are fed parts of plants that people can't or won't eat. all of the studies about the ecological impacts ignore this fact and then attribute the water used to produce, say, cotton to beef.
No... No... The studies account for that. Most cattle in the US are fed human quality base ingredient feed... It's much cheaper to feed them corn meal than anything else. (I say base ingredient because the standard on cattle feed as a whole is not human grade, but the bulk of the food, the corn, could be human grade if it had been processed for humans instead of cattle.)
For each study, we recorded the inventory of outputs and inputs (including fertilizer quantity and type, irrigation use, soil, and climatic conditions).
no. I just want to see how much water they say cows consumed from cotton and the total amount of water they say was used to grow the cotton. and then I want you to ask yourself if it's reasonable to attribute ANY of that water to cows (it isn't)
i'm having problems right now even pulling up the full article, but, to my recollection, they didn't actually gather any of this data themselves, so you should be able to find some oblique reference to water used somewhere in the body of the paper, and then follow the citation to the actual study that did gather the data.
Not trying to be a dick here, but do you honestly think that you, a non-expert who likely doesn't even practice in ecology or environmental sciences, are the authority here on whether any studies have attempted to account for the water consumption based on the feed variety and sources?
Because if you thought of it as a way to shoot down a random internet comment, then the experts who work in the field have certainly done so and followed through with those calculations already. Have you ever met a professor? They fucking love to tear apart arguments because it gets their names into publications and that's how they earn tenure and notoriety for grant funding.