[fred_is_fred]

Water has been financialized for years in the western US. Developers buy and sell water rights from farmers, farmers own farms where they don't grow crops because the water is going to condos. Water rights are bought and sold and traded all the time.

[calvinmorrison]

Water rights have been finacialized for thousands of years. Qanats, which are underground sort of canals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat) were built in Persia to distribute water to agriculture and incentivized by government

"It was an Achaemenid ruling that in case someone succeeded in constructing a qanat and bringing groundwater to the surface in order to cultivate land, or in renovating an abandoned qanat, the tax he was supposed to pay the government would be waived not only for him but also for his successors for up to 5 generations"

[fred_is_fred]

Thanks. I love hearing bits of interesting history like that. I'd never heard of Qanats.

[calvinmorrison]

It's a good scrabble word

[octoberfranklin]

Or the farmers grow alfalfa once every five years simply to avoid losing their water rights.