That's one of the strangest and most restrictive laws i've ever heard. What is the reasoning behind it, if any? Here we have no mineral rights, so if i find gold or petroleum on my lava it belongs to the state? HAHA But water?
Oscar
Yeah, I don't have mineral rights either... Technically I own the land, but not anything under it or that falls on it.
Colorado set up a system of water rights in the late 19th century called prior-appropriation water rights. Basically, the first person to take water from a lake or river and put it to "appropriate use" was granted a perpetual right to do so. Collecting any water from the upstream watershed is considered stealing from those downstream. And from Colorado, it's all downstream; someone in Nebraska technically owns all the rain that falls on my property. Almost all of the western US states use this same form of water rights. Colorado is legally obligated to send California a certain volume of water through the Colorado river every year, for example.
They didn't really consider droughts when they set this system up, and to make matters worse, most of the allocations were based on a particularly wet period in history-- the net effect is that there are always more water rights owners than water these days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_appropriation_water_rightsControl of the way someone uses water, also forcing people to rely on the distributed water. Can't have people relying on nature and growing their own food now... 
Farming and food production is reserved for the big corp. farms.
Since most water rights were claimed over 100 years ago, it isn't the big corporate farms or even big government that pushed this through, but the net effect in modern times is forced reliance on government water distribution and large corporate farms that can afford the water rights.
Kevin
