That’s a good question. I don’t know if this farmer gets his water for “free,” or not.
He says because of subsidies and old water rights, farmers don't pay the true cost of their water, especially the environmental costs. As the water supply for cities gets stretched ever thinner, he'd like to see restrictive water laws loosened up so there's a truly free market.
"If you were to allocate an acre-foot of water to a high tech industry in California, it would produce 16,000 jobs or there abouts," Graham said. "Allocate the same amount of water to growing alfalfa, it produces about eight jobs in the entire chain. So it's 2,000 times more efficient to move the water, and yet our laws don't allow it."