Rain Maker's Augustus Doricko on cloud seeding bans, water scarcity, and plans to buy desert land to terraform

Summary

Augustus Doricko, founder of Rain Maker, is fighting a two-front war: keeping cloud seeding legal across the United States while building the commercial case that water scarcity is already severe enough to make the business viable.

The regulatory threat

29 states this year have proposed legislation that would blanket-ban weather modification and atmospheric engineering. The bills aren't targeted at cloud seeding specifically — they're driven by public anxiety about chemtrails and solar radiation management, and cloud seeding gets swept up because most legislators don't distinguish between the three. Doricko is actively lobbying in state capitals, though he says showing up to testify sometimes generates more backlash than it defuses. The political split isn't partisan — it's geographic. Western states, which are water-stressed, are broadly supportive. Eastern and southeastern states, including Florida, are where the resistance is sharpest, despite Doricko's argument that 14 million acres of Florida farmland is currently in drought and 30,000 acres of Miami-Dade County recently burned because of it.

If Rain Maker is banned in the US entirely, Doricko says the fallback is to double down on Riyadh and operate internationally for five years before returning.

The safety argument

Cloud seeding dates to 1945 — GE filed the first patent in 1946 — and there are decades of watershed studies on silver iodide concentrations in soil and water. After extended operation, silver iodide shows up only at parts-per-trillion levels, requiring sophisticated instrumentation to detect at all. Doricko also points to the lethal dose comparison: the LD50 for silver iodide is 2,800 milligrams per kilogram, versus roughly single-digit milligrams per kilogram for table salt, making it far less acutely toxic than common substances.

On the question of whether seeding rain in one area steals precipitation downwind, Doricko argues the system isn't that zero-sum. Only 9% of all water traversing the US atmosphere actually precipitates over land — the rest cycles back through the oceans or evaporates — so increasing atmospheric utilization is largely additive rather than redistributive.

The water scarcity case

The scale of the problem is broader than public perception allows. California's Department of Natural Resources projects that half a million acres of farmland will need to convert to desert by 2030 to maintain water supply for cities. Phoenix has banned new housing development due to water constraints. The Great Salt Lake is drying to the point of causing respiratory problems in Salt Lake City. Doricko frames wildfires across the country as a downstream water problem as much as a climate one.

The land fund

Doricko plans to launch a land acquisition subsidiary in Q1 or Q2, buying desert land in Arizona and California that currently trades at around $6,000 per acre — the same soil quality as Central Valley land that sells for $70,000 to $500,000 per acre. The thesis is to terraform that land using Rain Maker's water production, then either flip it or hold it as agricultural assets. He plans to raise LP capital into the fund structure. The vertical integration logic is straightforward: own the land you're raining on and capture the full value of the water you create.

Desalination

Doricko is not hostile to desalination but sees conveyance as its binding constraint. A desalination plant on the California coast does nothing for Colorado, Nevada, or the Central Valley without hundreds of miles of large-diameter pipe and the eminent domain to build it. For interior states, he argues cloud seeding is the only practical mechanism to create new water where it's needed. He floats, partly in jest, the idea of nuclear-powered ocean boiling to generate clouds large enough to push atmospheric rivers inland.