Tim Hess

speaker

10 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 2 May

Tim Hess’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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More or Less · Does it take 15,000 litres of water to produce a kilogram of beef? · 2 May 2026 podcast

When the concept of water footprint was first developed, it was recognised that not all water is the same.

And a differentiation was made between green water that has come from rainfall, differentiated from blue water, that's water in our water resources, whether it's rivers, lakes, whether it's water that is underground in our aquifers.

It takes a lot of feed to keep those animals alive for two years before they go into the food system.

So they are just using the rain at the point where the rain falls and they're only using green water.

But in other countries we have systems where animals are fed on crops which have been irrigated.

So in that case we're taking the blue water to grow the crops like maize, silage and then feeding those to animals.

So in the UK, we have an average for animal production of about 67 litres per kilogram of beef of blue water consumption.

But there are some figures from the US, from Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, ranging from 900 through to almost 8,000 cows.

So if we want to make choices about sustainable diets, we want to make choices about is this product having more impact on the water environment than that product, then we shouldn't be including the green water.

That's very misleading.

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