Water Funding For Western Land Owners

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Farmers and ranchers are stewards of the land, so they are often the target when watersheds show signs of depletion or pollution. The Freshwater Trust, led by CEO Joe Whitworth, believes they have cracked the code on scalable river restoration by aligning funding and incentives around results using technology.

Whitworth… “ There is a jumble of dollars and agencies all involved in water some way or another, but they're not coordinated. Very difficult for a typical landowner to sort of find their way through the thicket of money that is totally available from a bunch of different sources to actually get it into their operation in a way that doesn't cause brain damage and gets results. And so we've started to leverage technology to, you know, we can sort through 30 million acres and find the 10,000 that matter, and then put the deals together for those landowners in a way that doesn't take 'em three years of tax returns and planning and permitting. They can do it a lot more like leasing their next F350 in an afternoon.”

Whitworth said making this process easy and accessible is the only way to address the underlying problems with water that exist at such a large scale.