Water Always Wins

farmers and their lobby are typically distrustful of Big State Government. (Although that’s ironic, given that they benefit from state and federal largesse. As author Marc Reisner puts it in his classic tome on Western water, Cadillac Desert: “With huge dams built for him at public expense, and irrigation canals, and the water sold for a quarter of a cent per ton—a price which guaranteed that little of the public’s investment would ever be paid back—the West’s yeoman farmer became the embodiment of the welfare state, though he was the last to recognize it.”)