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It's 1900 gallons of water for a pound of almonds.
It's 10-20 gallons of water per day per 100lbs for a steer, which does not lactate. Lactating cows take twice as much, but produce daily milk product. Worst case, steer is sold by 36 months, but often 12-18 for the prime market. At 3 years, the cattle farmer starts to lose money on the animal so there is the incentive to sell while the product is best. Let's say it's 2 years (730 days) at 220 gallons per day, assuming an 1,100 average weight from birth to sale and the high end of 20 gallons (CA weather)/100lbs per day. That's 160,600 gallons of water over 2 years. Divide that by the weight of the animal, and almost all byproducts are used, so usable is about 1,000 pounds. That's 161 gallons per pound of beef product (inc. the 100lbs of animal waste). I see biased claims that it's upwards of 6-8000 gallons for 8 ounces of steak, which is complete bullshit. I had a small farm and my ex a large one and these animals are grass-fed and only trough as needed. My ex gets expired food from the supermarkets to feed her livestock, chickens, horses and other animals--else it would just go into the dumpster. This symbiotic relationship between stores and farm saves both the costs of waste management and food purchase and puts that edible but unable to be sold food to use.
An ironic thing is that some of the almond waste is used as cattle feed, along with the surplus corn and other grains, hay, timothy that can't make it to market or are specifically grown for feed. They may be added into the total equation for water use, but many of those are byproducts from feeding people that have gone awry. Those studies also probably fail at considering most of the animal is used, not just sirloins, for a vast myriad of consumer, pet, and supplement products, from the hide to the tongues, brain, tripe, stomach, hooves, ears, bones, etc. Practically everything.
Oh, and as far as the moisture product on the grazing, that is performed on plants that would normally grow or a variant irrigated grass for the livestock, and those plants that would occupy that space would still consume water and when they die, it would just escape into the atmosphere. Attributing some mass water usage to these crops besides periodic irrigation would just be to pad numbers. Also, while the animals graze, much of the crop is not uprooted and destroyed, so they trim it down and the plant regrows to height for a future meal.
2019's almond production was 2.5 BILLION pounds, or 4.75 TRILLION gallons of water @ 1,900/lb.
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/California/Publications/Specialty_and_Other_Releases/Almond/Forecast/201905almpd.pdf
Walnuts, almonds, pistachios use the same amount of water as almonds, but are not the in-demand product almonds are.
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