[Retric]

Desalination isn’t cost prohibitive to build, it unfortunately costs an absurd amount of money to run at the scale farmers use water. And then you’re faced with trying to pump that water upstream to users.

The basic issue is farmers can only make money with practically free water they get from natural sources. Anything that raise the average price per gallon is useless to them and they own most water rights. The long term solution is to reduce the amount of farming via eminent domain and rejecting all new farming operations.

[no_wizard]

I was considering cities first with this, which I realize isn't the biggest use of this water but is part of it.

I also imagine with continued investment and research the tech could get better at scale too. It may be hard today but perhaps there's headroom for innovation with more funding while tackling migrating cities to using desalination

[Retric]

A single mid sized farm can use more water than a town of 30,000 people.

What’s affordable for a town is several orders of magnitude different than what’s viable for that farmer.