In many countries, the adverse impact of agriculture on water sources has been discussed with more attention recently by the water footprint estimation. Brazil is the second largest animal protein' exporter, and this demand has a tendency to increase significantly until 2050, and in this context the water management will be crucial. Thus, the present study aimed to evaluate the water footprint and productivity in the broiler and swine slaughtered in Brazil from 2008 to 2018. The results showed that the herds of broiler and swine were concentrated in three main regions: Midwest, Southeast and South, representing 97.1% of the broilers and 99.7% of the swine slaughtered in Brazil. During the studied decade, the slaughter of broiler and swine increased 9.1 and 25.8%, respectively. The broiler and swine water footprint decreased by 15.4 and 3.5%, respectively. The average volume of water needed for the production of broiler and swine meat was 2533 L kg-1 and 3754 L kg-1, respectively. The average water productivity per kg of broiler meat was 0.397 kg m-3, while for swine it was 0.269 kg m-3. The average water productivity for soybean was 0.497 kg m-3, and for corn it was 1.18 kg m-3. The decrease in the water footprint is a result of the improvement of management practices, highlighting that it is necessary to improve the knowledge about the use of the water footprint methodology as a tool for water management to help public policies.
Keywords: Agricultural crops; Animal protein; Water consumption; Water demand.
© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.