Investors are buying up rural Arizona farmland to sell the water to urban homebuilders – By Ian James & Geoff Hing (Arizona Republic) / Nov 25 2021
CIBOLA — In fields on the Arizona-California border, farmers draw water from the nearby Colorado River to grow alfalfa, irrigating crops as they have for decades.
That could change soon. An investment company has purchased nearly 500 acres of farmland and wants to strip it of its water and send it 200 miles across the desert to a Phoenix suburb, where developers plan to build thousands of new houses.
Similar deals could follow as the demand for water in the growing Southwest outpaces the dwindling supply. Investors are buying farmland not to harvest hay or corn but the water, which is becoming a more valuable commodity.
Here along the western edge of Arizona, the investment company Greenstone bought 485 acres of farmland and now awaits federal approval to sell most of its water entitlement from the land to the town of Queen Creek, one of the fastest-growing suburbs in Arizona
