[WeylandYutani]

If you are going to use water at least let it be used for an industry that ads to the economy.

Intel provides a few thousand high paying jobs. Agriculture is heavily mechanised with the remainder of the work going to immigrants. Farming in my opinion is one of those industries that doesn't make sense in a Western economy. It's heavily subsidized because of "identity politics" not cold hard economic facts.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Do you mean "western" as in "Western USA" or as in "the West, i.e USA, Europe etc" ?

Food production independence absolutely makes sense. Growing food in a desert based on ignorant and overblown ideas from the 1940s about the impact of damming a couple of rivers and distributing the water ... probably not so much.