In 2011, Harvard University and a small private company began buying up rights to the West’s most important water source: the Colorado River. Within a year, they owned nearly 13,000 acres near the small Riverside County farming community of Blythe. Farmers in Blythe and the surrounding Palo Verde Valley are supposed to keep getting water even after nearly everyone else in the Southwestern United States runs dry. That’s thanks to a complex and bizarre system of water rights that California, six other states and Mexico use to share the Colorado.