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How about charging market value for water consumption?
How about the farmers pay back the trillion$ taxpayers spent destroying the Colorado basin to irrigate their desert crop lands?
And they can pay to now take the dams down, another $1T to restore the Colorado flow.
With global warming the Colorado flow is going to keep going down and there is none left for welfare ag or real estate developers fevered desert dreams.
OK, OK, they don't have to pay anything back or pay to fix the problem they profited from for decades but they don't get any more tax payer money.
Water's not there anymore.  Time for the farmers to move on and find other work. >

Because it's drying up to beyond horrifying levels and we're killing the planet. Maybe we should also re-examine the rest of what we're doing >

Eating is in a direct correlation with farming, so if we just eat less, we can need less farmland. >

Or eat differently. >

Wait wait wait, wouldn't that incentivize them overusing water in the hopes that they get a payout for reducing? Like how the hell is that actually going to achieve the result without massive amounts of fuckery? >

Most water rights operate on an allocation system.  Each city or even each farmer will own a certain amount of water flow out of the river.
The problem goes back to the beginning of our development in the region.  From the very beginning, we've allocated more water rights than actually exist in the river.  If the river flows X million gallons per year, then we've allocated X and a half in total rights.
That's kinda alright if some people don't use up their full allocation.  But we're definitely seeing the problems now when people *do* use up their full allocation.
It seems what they're proposing is paying some farmers to not use their full allocation so that their water can stay in the river instead.  That's pretty reasonable in the short term.
In the longer term, we probably need to renegotiate the amount of water allocated to everyone, but that's non-trivial now that so many people have made so many decisions and investments based on the current system. >

We could also maybe, just maybe... stop subsidizing animal agriculture and then we won't need to oay them to stop because they will go out of business. >

Maybe, just maybe… that’s unfortunately not an option because we have a shit ton of people to feed >

Nah, the resources it takes to raise a animals are far more than it takes to raise crops. >

Yeah, that idea should sink. >

Welfare kings. >

Paying farmers for not growing crops has been doing before >

The farmers who use the most water are giant multi-national corporations. Easy to see who will win this one. >

I've got a controversial idea: fines for water wasters. Better yet, seize their land if they don't fix their operations.