In the arid West, water is the resource that governs all the others, and in Idaho it is the subject of century-old rights, bitter disputes, and increasing scarcity. Gabriel Storm sees in that complexity not just conflict but opportunity, and he has built a company around managing water more intelligently — and, he is candid, more profitably.
His firm develops technology and services to help agricultural users, municipalities, and industry measure, trade, and conserve water within Idaho's byzantine system of rights. The premise is that as growth and drought put ever more pressure on a finite supply, the value of using each acre-foot efficiently rises accordingly — and someone has to build the tools to do it.
Storm is careful about the politics, which are treacherous. Water in Idaho is freighted with history and emotion, and any outsider perceived as commodifying it invites fierce resistance. He frames his work not as trading water for profit but as helping the existing system function under strain it was never designed to bear.
"Nobody's making more water," Storm says. "The state's making a lot more people and a lot more industry. Something has to give, and I'd rather it be waste than farms or families. That's a business. It's also, I think, a public service."
