Ghost cattle — 200,000 made-up heifers. A massive fraud rocking eastern Washington’s arid ranching communities, leading to criminal charges and bankruptcy. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a Bill Gates-owned company duking it out at the auction block, each willing to spend more than $200 million to buy 22,500 acres of ranchland and its associated water rights.

These were just some of the headlines from this past summer when Cody Easterday of Mesa, Washington, pleaded guilty to defrauding Tyson Foods and another unnamed company of more than $244 million. He did so, according to court documents, by billing for the care of those imaginary animals.

After he pleaded guilty, the bidding war started. In June, the Church’s agricultural holding company beat out Gates’ 100C LLC, cementing the Latter-day Saints as one of the largest commercial agricultural landowners in the Western United States.

That’s raised troubling questions about land consolidation, a decades-long trend fueled by the demise of the family farm. But there’s a more complicated, and potentially troubling consequence to that purchase.

The water.

As Western lands are consolidated, so too are the rights to use the water that flows under and over those lands. As the Pacific Northwest gets warmer and drier, water is becoming a hot commodity that’s attracting investors — whether it’s the Latter-day Saints, large agricultural interests or New York investors.

And while state laws across the region regulate how, when and why water rights are sold, some worry it won’t be enough to hold back the tide.

“I think we are ripe for the picking in terms of speculation and people coming in and trying to get their hands on these water rights,” says Rachael Osborn, a longtime water lawyer in Washington State and cofounder of the Washington Water Trust. “A lot of people are now thinking they are sitting on pots of gold, and they have every intention of trying to sell their water rights when they no longer need them. It’s really unfortunate that we’ve gotten to this point, where people think they can make a lot of money off water.”

Read the full article about consolidating Western land rights by Eli Francovich at The Counter.