Got Water? | Western U.S. Water & Animal Ag

Hello friend!

Well well well, we’ve come crawling back to you with another double-wide 40-minute video when we promised to only make 20-minute videos, huh?

This time it wasn’t our fault: water rights and animal agriculture are simply too complicated to jam into the length of an episode of New Girl. We’re sorry, we party.

And our eagle-eyed readers might notice a marked change in this newsletter: the unsubscribe button. Higher in the scroll than it’s ever been before. But we had no choice, after a reader named Hermanth (“not Heman or Herman”) informed us that another newsletter (from their local garden center) placed their unsubscribe link in the second line of text. 

But we will not be outdone.

So you will now find our unsubscribe button at the very top of the scroll. Victory!

And as a reminder:

• Yes! We still have Patreon.

• Yes! We still have Climate Town t-shirts that we made a whole episode about.

• Yes! We still have a podcast called The Climate Denier’s Playbook.

And if you think that’s a lot of Climate Town-related links, just you wait, because: 

Climate Town writer/director (and co-writer of this newsletter) Matt Nelsen has been making commercial wine in Sonoma, California for the past few years, while he works on a multi-year documentary project about wine and climate change. And at long last, he’s approved and ready to legally sell it. If you want to learn more about that, and maybe even buy some of that wine, here’s the newly announced website to check out (the first release will be in September 2024). 

But also– what about that 40-minute video we mentioned earlier? Well, friend, to lead us in, here’s a great old paraphrased quote we saw flying around, but have no idea where it came from:

“When water’s what you need, water’s the only thing that’ll do.”

A Tall Glass of Livestock Feed Irrigation Water

This video started with one nice-looking chart from this New York Times article by Elena Shao, based on data from a 2020 study on Colorado River water usage:

Because it turns out that, of all the water consumed on the famously constrained Colorado River:

More than half of that water goes to growing food for animal agriculture.

For you statsheads out there, that means more water on the Colorado River goes to irrigating livestock feed than EVERYTHING ELSE COMBINED.

And before we move on, we want to quickly say: Elena Shao does some incredible graphics work for the New York Times and they’re lucky to have her. We also featured her piece examining the emissions per mile of mega-EVs in our newsletter about Super Bowl car ads. So we’ll give you another chance: click here to check out more of her work. And what the hell, here’s her website. Great work!

And of all that one trillion gallons of livestock feed water per year, a lot of it goes to one crop in particular: alfalfa. 

And yeah this is all in the video we just put out. But for you busy folks that haven’t had FORDY MINUTES to watch our video yet, here are some facts you can tell your friends when you want to be depressing at dinner:

• The Colorado River water was divided up over 100 years ago, which came to be known as the Colorado River Compact. But right from the start, they divided up the rights to more water than the river provides. But that should be fine, I’m sure we can OH NO NOW THERE’S CLIMATE CHANGE and there’s even less available water than before.

• The water rights on the Colorado are typically ‘use it or lose it,’ so anyone with existing water rights is HEAVILY incentivised to use every last drop.

• Alfalfa f*cking loves the sun, but also needs a lot of water. So if you can grow it in the desert with nearly unlimited water, you can harvest 10-12 times a year, with incredible yields. And basically no compromise at all!

• That’s how you get a SINGLE FARMING FAMILY in the desert valley near Palm Springs using more water than the ENTIRE LAS VEGAS METROPOLITAN AREA. And the top 20 families in the region (the not-at-all-villainous-sounding Imperial Valley) “use more of the [Colorado] river than all of Wyoming, Nevada, or New Mexico.”

• Alfalfa is prized for its high protein content, and is often fed to dairy cows, who need a higher protein diet to blast out piping hot milk.

So while it’s still an issue to have folks like the Kardashians and Sylvester Stallone using hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a month, when you think about water usage on the Colorado, you really need to think first about meat and dairy.

And you don’t really have to take our word for all of this. Let’s take Brian Richter’s word for it, since he’s one of the authors of that 2020 Colorado River water study, as well as a more in-depth, updated study published earlier this year:

“It’s important to acknowledge that farmers are growing what people want and are willing to pay for. And the reason we’re using so much of the Colorado River water to feed cows is because of our demand for beef and dairy products. And our demand for dairy, and specifically cheese, has been going up, which is causing expansion of dairies in a lot of the West and in the Colorado River Basin, and so that’s why they’re growing so much alfalfa.”

So what if, just as an idea, we didn’t demand so much dairy-and-specifically-cheese?

Well, friend, that’s just not gonna work for Dairy Management Inc:

Please Drink Your Milkshake

If we say Dream Team, you’re probably immediately thinking of the guy from the shoes and a bunch of his friends going full-on basketball on small groups of international plumbers and firemen in the 90s.

But if we say Dairy Dream Team, you probably immediately have no idea what the f*ck we’re talking about. But don’t worry, you only have to read one quote to get caught up:

Dairy Management Inc. (DMI) assembled a “Dairy Dream Team” consisting of chefs, recipe developers, “foodies,” gamers and lifestyle influencers who have a combined 25 million social media followers. They are joined by another 100-plus influencers who work with state and regional checkoff teams and are tasked with presenting unique recipes and ways dairy can be enjoyed by consumers, particularly Gen Z (ages 9 to 24).

And much like the Olympics (keep it steady), this new Dream Team does what it does best (nice and easy) while promoting the interests and positive image of the powerful group behind it (yes, good comparison).

You see, Dairy Management is a massive marketing group which has pretty much one purpose:

Sell more milk.

About 40 years ago, it was the 1980s, and the U.S. government was just coming out of the “government cheese” crisis. 

Basically, after World War II, the U.S. agreed to be an incredibly good friend to the dairy industry. Under the Dairy Product Price Support Program, the U.S. would buy up excess dairy if the price went too low – and in the 1970s, that exact scenario played out, leaving the U.S. with so much quick-to-spoil milk that they turned it into cheese and other dairy products so it would last longer. This article says the U.S. cheese stockpile was 560 million pounds at this time, and we have no reason to doubt that.

But, unfortunately, cheese will also eventually spoil, and that eventual spoiling hit in the Reagan years. That brings us back to the Go Go 1980s baby!

While one USDA official said that “probably the cheapest and most practical thing would be to dump it in the ocean,” the U.S. eventually landed on giving the cheese away. And they gave away a f*cking ton of almost-or-maybe-already-spoiled cheese.

As the dust settled, they knew they didn’t want to repeat this embarrassing government cheese stockpile again. But they also knew the dairy industry needed help to drive enough milk demand to maintain production.

So instead of the USDA just buying up excess milk, they would oversee a promotional group that pushes milk on the public, so that people would choose to buy that excessive milk themselves, giving us:

The National Dairy Promotion & Research Board.

Overseen by the USDA, funded primarily by taxes on dairy products, absolutely gaga for milk, and directly reasonable for Dairy Management. And that’s just one of a number of dairy industry promotion groups. There’s also MilkPEP, another national dairy promotion group, as well as state-level groups, like the California Milk Processor Board.

All of these groups are known as checkoffs, named for the way farmers could voluntarily ‘check off’ a box to contribute to these programs in the early days of their existence. And yeah there are a bunch more for other agriculture industries: beef, pork, cotton, American eggs, Christmas trees, highbush blueberries, Hass avocados, and more. Popcorn.

But in the history of all these checkoffs, there’s probably no more famous campaign than:

Got Milk?

Roll the ad:

Good lord we’ve talked about this commercial before, but we really should have waited til now, because it’s actually incredibly relevant to this section. But it’s such a legendary commercial, directed by Michael Bay, that we just couldn’t help ourselves.

And that campaign is the work of the California Milk Processor Board, who hired San Francisco ad agency Goodby, Silverstien, & Partners to help milk stand up to beverage villains like soda, Snapple, and good ole water.

Did they declare victory and go home after that one great ad? Hell no. 

They licensed the campaign to the national MilkPEP for print (which featured celebrity after wrestling celebrity after celebrity) and also made this commercial that shows kids that your arms fall off if you don’t drink The Product:

Success?

According to Edward Wasserman from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism:

“They start with a product with no personality, which, if anything, was forced upon generations of children, which very few adults drank or would admit to drinking, whose health benefits are questionable, whose environmental impact is dubious, and they turned it into something that had a kind of panache. They had a concession of unlikely subjects and had them pose in a way that most people would have deemed a self-parody or ludicrous. And yet, it worked.”

But did it? Well, through the course of the Got Milk era, fluid milk sales actually fell. By a lot.

The daily consumption of fluid milk—as opposed to milk-based products like cheese, yogurt, and butter—has steadily declined from 0.96 cups per person in 1970 to 0.59 cups in 2011.

But wait–

Success!

Because milk can be turned into a ton of other products, and those have gone absolutely demand wild. Cheese, butter, yogurt, ice cream, you know: dairy.

Overall milk production in the US has grown by 35% since 2000. That’s not because Americans want to drink more milk; in fact, per capita milk drinking has dropped by 27%. Instead, much more milk is being produced to meet increased demands for yogurt (+378%) and cheese (+72%).

And you better believe the nationwide web of dairy checkoffs had their creamy little hands in:

• The Domino’s New Yorker pizza that has over two pounds of cheese on a single pie.

• Adding MrBeast to the “Undeniably Dairy” campaign with this virtual farm tour.

• Pizza Hut’s stuffed crust pizza.

• The Quesalupa at Taco Bell. Oh and recently they partnered on “a frozen drink mixing dairy with Mountain Dew and a burrito with ten times the cheese of a typical taco.”

• The viral butter board trend from a couple years ago? Yeah, that’s from a member of the Dairy Dream Team.

• The Grimace milkshake from McDonald’s that a lot of people apparently really don’t like. Also you should just read this tweet so we don’t have to paraphrase it.

There’s even a letter from two Pizza Hut employees praising Dairy Management’s “cheese ideas” that they signed as “LORD OF THE CHEESE” and “LADY OF THE CHEESE” (we found out about this letter in this Johnny Harris video and it seems like he got it from the New York Times):

And you better believe they’re still in the prowl:

“Quick-serve restaurants in the U.S. sell about 2 billion chicken sandwiches each year that do not contain a slice of cheese. This is about 80 percent of a booming category. If the 20 percent of chicken sandwiches that do have cheese grew to 30 percent – and that growth meant a 5-ounce slice of cheese on every item – that’s an additional 700 million pounds of milk moved every year!”

AWESOME!

But if we all just love dairy products so much that billions of gallons of water from one of the most water-constrained regions in the entire country goes to growing dairy cow food every year:

Why is the dairy industry spending hundreds of millions every year to get us to buy more?

And even with all this marketing effort, in 2016, dairy farmers still had to pour out FORTY MILLION GALLONS of milk because there wasn’t enough demand.

And we still have over a BILLION pounds of cheese stashed in refrigerated reserves around the country.

And we haven’t even talked about the beef industry and the whole checkoff promotional side of the cattle meat business.

So do we all really want half of the water we get from the Colorado River to go to cow food?

If we ask the meat and dairy industries, it really seems like the answer is no. Because if they did, we have to assume they’d all be happy to keep those hundreds of millions of dollars they’re wasting on influencing the public.

And to round us off, let’s go back to Colorado River water study author Brian Richter:

“Personally, once I started this research, I gave up beef consumption altogether.”

Official Rollie (no prize): Better Than Got Milk?

We gassed up Michael Bay’s famous Alexander Hamilton/Got Milk ad a lot in this episode, but it’s not like he’s got the best ad gold medal locked up. 

So for this installment of the Official Rollie (no prize): scour your mind and the Internet for what you think is the single greatest commercial ever made and send it to us. 

We will then watch that commercial entry with a critical and discerning, but ultimately fair, eye. And if that commercial beats (or even ties) the Michael Bay/Aaron Burr Got Milk commercial: we will declare you an official Rollie (no prize).

And as for last edition’s Official Rollie (no prize), we had but two successful applicants, who were both willing and capable of completing the challenge, which included mailing one (1) letter:

• Rowan Price

• Holly Sauer

Congratulations, Rowan and Holly. There is no prize.

How about that, friend?

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Well that's the end of the newsletter. If you want to send in a question, all you have to do is respond to this email. Or contact us directly at newsletter@climatetown.tv. We may never answer it, but you never know.

Also, if you think you found a mistake, let us know. We try our very best to research and review our way to full accuracy, but it's a big world out there.

Edited and additional research by: Caroline Schaper

Art by: Laura Conte

Legal support from: The Civil Liberties Defense Center

Executive produced by: Rollie Williams and Matt Nelsen