They don’t do the math for this in the article. A recipe I found says it takes 2.5 cups of almonds to make a gallon of almond milk. Another source says there are 92 almonds average in a cup. With the figure given in the article, 3.2 gallons of water to grow one almond, that means each gallon of California grown almond milk requires use of 736 gallons of water.
They mention it takes 30-50 gallons of water to sustain a cow, but don’t mention that much of that is water required by growing grass, which is water that cannot readily be put to other uses. They also fail to mention the average milk production of a cow: 7.5 gallons per day in the US, so that’s only (roughly) 7 gallons of water per gallon of cow’s milk produced.
I’m under the impression other plant based milks are radically more water efficient, but aren’t as profitable as almonds.
A very long sidenote: I was curious about the water consumption of almond trees. I found that a typical tree will produce roughly a ton of almonds over a 30 year lifespan. They will also produce about 7 times that much mass of shells around the almonds. The tree will weigh between half and a full ton by the end of that 30 years. I couldn’t find a number I trust for how much leaf matter is discarded by a typical orchard tree in 30 years of growing, but I expect that to be substantial also. Overall, it seems that a typical orchard almond tree needs 20-25 thousand gallons of water per year, versus 6-8 thousand for other trees of a similar size.
They don’t do the math for this in the article. A recipe I found says it takes 2.5 cups of almonds to make a gallon of almond milk. Another source says there are 92 almonds average in a cup. With the figure given in the article, 3.2 gallons of water to grow one almond, that means each gallon of California grown almond milk requires use of 736 gallons of water.
They mention it takes 30-50 gallons of water to sustain a cow, but don’t mention that much of that is water required by growing grass, which is water that cannot readily be put to other uses. They also fail to mention the average milk production of a cow: 7.5 gallons per day in the US, so that’s only (roughly) 7 gallons of water per gallon of cow’s milk produced.
I’m under the impression other plant based milks are radically more water efficient, but aren’t as profitable as almonds.
A very long sidenote: I was curious about the water consumption of almond trees. I found that a typical tree will produce roughly a ton of almonds over a 30 year lifespan. They will also produce about 7 times that much mass of shells around the almonds. The tree will weigh between half and a full ton by the end of that 30 years. I couldn’t find a number I trust for how much leaf matter is discarded by a typical orchard tree in 30 years of growing, but I expect that to be substantial also. Overall, it seems that a typical orchard almond tree needs 20-25 thousand gallons of water per year, versus 6-8 thousand for other trees of a similar size.