A Preliminary Study on a New Approach to Estimate Water Resource Allocation: The Net Water Footprint Applied to Animal Products

We propose the Net Waterfootprint (WFPnet) method to estimate the water footprint (WFP) of food products, in alternative to the current WFP method, based on absolute values. We compared the WFP and WFPnet methods for cattle milk and meat production in different feed efficiency (high and low) and crop water use efficiency (WUE; high, medium and low) scenarios under Mediterranean conditions. The WFP values were, on average, much higher than the WFPnet values for both meat and milk. The WFPnet method appears to be able to properly quantify the water consumption needed for animal food production.