[greeneggs]

To put 15 billion gallons of water in context, that's about the same amount of water as used by 15 to 30 square miles of alfalfa. Arizona has ~400 square miles dedicated to growing alfalfa, worth ~$400 million per year.

(Maybe someone else can put this in terms of Libraries of Congress?)

sources: https://wisdomanswer.com/how-much-water-does-an-alfalfa-plan... https://civileats.com/2021/09/15/climate-change-could-put-an...

[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.