Across the drought-stricken American West, investors are buying farmland not for crops, but for the increasingly valuable water rights attached to them.
As climate change worsens water scarcity, these rights become gold mines — one company achieved a $14 million profit selling water rights to a Phoenix suburb. While billionaires like the Resnicks control a massive water bank in California and wealthy investors amass water rights to the Colorado River, startup Rainmaker is taking a different approach: deploying cloud-seeding drones to artificially increase rain and snowfall. The Hustle’s Noelle Medina investigates water rights in the Colorado River Basin and talks one-on-one with Rainmaker’s CEO to understand how he’s leveraging this gap in the market