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by cjensen 3245 days ago
They have no water rights sufficient to create a farm in the middle of the desert. They bought a town which only draws enough water for personal use and some small gardens.

It's also on the way to Las Vegas, but requires you to detour on a dirt road for a significant distance. That's not going to happen -- it's simpler for tourists to just continue on their way to Las Vegas.
4 comments
duskwuff 3245 days ago
Calling Nipton a "town" is a bit of an exaggeration, too. From what I'm seeing in the satellite photos, it's barely a wide spot in the road, in the middle of the desert, near what might have once been a train station. I've seen truck stops larger than this.

(And I'm not exaggerating when I say "in the middle of the desert". It's right on the edge of the Mojave National Preserve. This is not a good place for anything, let alone for agriculture.)

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dan1234 3245 days ago
Assuming i've found the right place[1], I doubt Nipton would even be counted as a village in the UK.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Nipton,+CA+92364,+USA/@3...

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duskwuff 3245 days ago
That's the one. If you zoom in to Street View, you can see the back side of the "Hotel Nipton".
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jlewallen 3245 days ago
I've driven through Nipton more times than I can count. It's a ghost town, I don't know how people survive there.
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rsync 3245 days ago
"They have no water rights sufficient to create a farm in the middle of the desert."

They may have no water sufficient to create a farm in the middle of the desert, but I don't think it's a problem of water rights.

As a Colorado native I have a good sense of water rights, but as a farmer in California I have been (pleasantly ?) surprised by how little restriction or ownership there is attached to water here ... it is very unlikely that the water rights are not attached to their parcels and its possible that they were never detached at any point.

All they have to do is dig a well. Maybe nothing will come out, but nobody will stop them ...

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Houshalter 3245 days ago
A sealed greenhouse can be very water efficient by recycling the water.
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weaksauce 3245 days ago
i mean if they want to have some legal weed(and gambling) there is primm in the same amount of distance from the off ramp that you would be taking anyway. 10 miles on a small road vs. 10 miles on a freeway to primm.
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