Investment in Water Futures?

Fortune looks at the rising value of water:

Flip through the latest 10-Ks of companies from Coca-Cola (KO) to Campbell Soup (CPB) and you'll find water-related worries enumerated among the possible hazards to operations. Coke lists "water scarcity" as a risk factor behind only "obesity concerns," which the company warns might reduce demand for some of its products. Nestlé chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, who heads the 2030 Water Resource Group, a public-private collaboration among leading beverage companies, development banks, and several government agencies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, has even dedicated a personal blog to global water issues.
All of the corporations above, to be sure, have an obvious stake in the issue. Nestlé is the world's largest food company by sales and a dominant bottled-water seller in the U.S., with brands like Poland Spring and Perrier in its fold. Each year Miller sells more than $34 billion worth of Miller beer, Coors Light, Peroni, and some 200 other beer brands. Coke and Pepsi? Again, their interest in getting enough clean, fresh water to make their products is crystal clear.
Dozens of other industries, however, from chipmaking to fracking to meatpacking, also depend on having water aplenty. The long drought in Texas, for example, forced Cargill to close a beef-processing plant in Plainview last year as the number of cattle in the U.S. herd dropped to its lowest level in more than six decades. Dry pastures hurt grain output, pushing up prices for feed -- which, along with smaller herds, has led to sky-high prices for beef today.
"We've always thought about how water was important for beverages or chemicals," Goldman Sachs (GS) senior investment strategist Abby Joseph Cohen tells Fortune. "But how many other industries depend on water in the supply chain, for their workforce and production and to maintain a healthy environment around where they're operating?"
The answer may be virtually all of them. Which is why legions of business leaders, economists, and think-tankers are coming to reclassify water as a kind of buried treasure: "blue gold."

At a time when Cleveland, Detroit and Buffalo can use some good news, I'd say that being located on the largest freshwater lake system in the world qualifies as good news.  Water resources in the Northeast and Midwest will be strengths when businesses look to find cheap, reliable sources of water.  I can't tell you how long it will be before that is a major factor in industrial decision-making, but it sure hasn't been a major factor in residential location decisions.  Internal migration seems to be strongly correlated with water scarcity.

The Fortune story is all over the map on the subject of water, but the part of the article which caught my eye described a family farm in the Central Valley:

Sarah Woolf's 1,200-acre farm in Cantua Creek, Calif., sits in the Central Valley, which runs in a narrow stretch more than 400 miles through the middle of the state, covering an area about the size of West Virginia. Hemmed in by the Cascade Range to the north, the Tehachapi to the south, and the Sierra Nevada to the east, the valley has long been one of the most bountiful farming regions in the country. Though it has less than 1% of America's farmland, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, it supplies a quarter of the nation's food.
And for the past three years it has suffered the worst drought in almost anyone's memory. In January, with California's river and reservoir levels at record (or near record) lows, Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency. By March the drought was so severe that the state and federal governments, which both run systems that transport water from the Sierras to the valley, cut off supplies to farmers. That left many of them with two unpleasant options: Buy water on the spot market for up to four times the normal price or cut back sharply on planting.
Woolf, a third-generation farmer, grows tomatoes, onions, and garlic that typically end up as ketchup, salsa, and other products made by Heinz, P&G, and other big names in the food industry. Her choice was to farm only half of her land. "Customers are asking for our produce," she says, "but we can't deliver because we don't have the water." Officials say that more than 500,000 acres of otherwise rich, arable land in Central Valley will likely be left fallow this year. Acres of fruit and nut trees will die from lack of water......Back in the Central Valley, the land is still parched, even after some late-April rains. And the ground is sinking under Sarah Woolf 's feet. It is the result of sucking out water from her own property wells. Her family began using well water some decades ago, but after a while there was a problem. In a classic case of the tragedy of the commons, they and other farmers in the area were drawing so much water from the aquifer that the soil started dropping about a foot a year. Since the 1930s, the ground level at her farm has dropped 80 feet. "You're depleting a natural water source that can be replenished only if you take small amounts out," explains Woolf. "If you take water out fast, the pockets in the aqueduct that hold the water collapse and you can never get that aquifer back." Furthering the destructive cycle, the sinking ground plays havoc on the wells themselves, which can cost half-a-million dollars each to dig. Woolf has three on her farm.
There is yet another catch. Unlike the water from the Sierra runoff, the groundwater here is saline. Thousands of years ago the Central Valley was an inland sea, and as a result, its soil contains saline, boron, natural salt, and selenium. Not all crops can handle that -- boron, for instance, will cause almond trees to defoliate. Eventually the salt will build up in the soil, harming yields, says Woolf.
Standing at the edge of her sunken, salty fields, Woolf is at the center of a problem that won't go away anytime soon: How do you feed the world without enough water?

How in the hell does a farm sink 80 feet in 80 years?  How do you leave 50% of your land fallow?  How do you most effectively salt the earth?   In my opinion, the rain-fed grain belt of the Midwestern United States is one of its most important natural resources.  Farming the desert is not sustainable.  Looking for a good investment?  Look toward the water-rich Eastern and Midwestern U.S.