"The meat industry consumes over half of all water used for all purposes in the United States. Most of this water is used to irrigate cattle feedlots."
I replied to another one of your comments with the exact same links, but I'll to it again here so it doesn't get buried in a huge comment thread.
While all those facts may be true nationally, in California, agricultural irrigation is by far the highest use of water.
Taking one of the sources from the HuffPo article (http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1405/pdf/circ1405.pdf), 188 million gal/day used in livestock in California, while a staggering 23,100 million gal/day is used for irrigation. It's not even remotely close. The problem is irrigation, the article is correct, and meat has little to do with it in California.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-j-rose/how-to-take-long-s...
http://www.onegreenplanet.org/news/californias-drought-whos-...
"The meat industry consumes over half of all water used for all purposes in the United States. Most of this water is used to irrigate cattle feedlots."
http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/sustain/global/sensem/MeatIndustry...