Why should we subsidize the cost of them making money?

Most of those crops aren't directly subsidized. The problem is water rights which are legally tied to real estate. So there's no way to force farmers to pay market rates for water.

The externalized costs are absolutely being subsidized.

You can live out there with little water impact if you don't insist on importing the kind of green water intensive landscaping that the rest of the country wants. People living there is relatively ok from a water point of view (though from a power usage perspective we really should be building very different homes in that area too) it's doing farming in some of the drier parts of the US that seems wasteful when we know water is an issue there.

Nitpick: in the wet areas of the country it's not that we want green landscaping, it's that it is almost impossible to not have green landscaping because of how much rain we get.

Lay down a layer of rock landscaping over landscaping fabric around a home in suburban Minnesota without maintaining it (e.g. by aggressively applying weed preventer and weeding it) and in 3-5 years it will be covered with native prairie grasses and weeds growing between and around the rock.

What I mean is the grass monoculture, trees, shrubs and flowers that for the ur-lawn in the US most of the us that requires a lot of extra watering to maintain.

>grass monoculture, trees, shrubs and flowers that for the ur-lawn in the US most of the us that requires a lot of extra watering to maintain

It does not. I lived in the midwest for the majority of my life and never once had to water my lawn to keep everything green and alive.

> You can live out there with little water impact. it's doing farming in some of the drier parts of the US that seems wasteful when we know water is an issue there.

Ok then they'll use it up and the problem will solve itself.

I don't agree that you can live there and have the infrastructure to support jobs, food etc. with "very little impact"

Most of the water usage in the US west is farming not from residential use and a lot of residential use isn't destructive since it's treated and released.

Farming feeds people and gives them jobs. It's not a separate entity that has nothing to do with the people living there.

For the whole US only 1.3% of people are employed directly on farms and for Utah the number is 1,442 or 0.04% of the population. [0] There are other places farms can be other than a desert. Some jobs have too big of an impact to just support endlessly simply because it's someone's job. These water intensive processes have massive impacts on the environment, look at the valley in California that's sunk 11 feet because of the immense amount of water that's been pulled out of the land.

[0] https://jobs.utah.gov/jsp/utalmis/#/occupation/452093/report

>here are other places farms can be other than a desert.

Where?

You act like these farms are just there because they like wasting water. Someone is buying the product or they wouldn't exist.

If you want a modern lifestyle deal with it. Deserts are going to have to be used for growing stuff.

They should grow drought resistant crops that use less water, because what they're doing now isn't sustainable and will end soon. Maybe wheat, maybe some livestock grazing, maybe nothing at all in some parts.

So that's your opinion, and it's a perfectly valid opinion. We also need a better plan on how to use the water sooner rather than later, so we need to tell the Governor to get off his damn ass and do something productive rather than wasting water for his own damn benefit. If you can't see how that's just not conflict of interest, then we really can't have a proper conversation.

The farming will stop, one way or another. That much is certain, since the river is drying up. Whether it will stop in time to prevent other issues is the question.