The study aims to calculate the water footprint of swines slaughter in Santa Catarina State in the decade of 2001-2011, and to evaluate the impact of nutritional strategies in the value of blue and gray water footprint. Five different nutritional strategies were assessed: T1, conventional diet, T2, diet with amino acids, T3, diet with phytase, T4, diet with organic minerals, T5, diet with the technologies (T2, T3 and T4). The values of water footprint showed increasing pattern over the decade, due to an increase in the number of animals slaughtered. Conventional diet had the highest value and the diet with three strategies the lowest. The reduction was 18% among these treatments. The highest value to gray water footprint was found for conventional diet (15,073 m³ year-1) and lowest for strategy with phytase (11,307 m³ year-1). For each liter of water used 179 kcal in T1, 200 kcal in T2, 193 kcal in T3, 200 kcal in T4, and 218 kcal in T5 were generated. The macro-region West accounted for 75 to 77% of the total water footprint for a given year and the South macro-region for 9 to 12%. The results support that the use of nutritional strategies provide a swine production more conservationist in water use, reducing their blue and grey water footprints.
amino acids; drinking water; organic minerals; phosphorus; phytase
