Aren't water wells permitted? In that case, you simply require a meter, ideally the cellular or zigbee sort. I'm sure there would be water bandits but it doesn't seem totally impossible.

Hang on, you want me to pay the local government for water under my land that they don't treat or pump for me? You're going to have to adjust some property laws in the US (and at least England and Canada I would guess) to do that.

I thought surface rights and water rights were already unbundled in a lot of US states.

Rain barrels are/were illegal in a lot of US areas because you didn’t own the water that landed on your property.

Wait, what now? Read that out loud and consider the idea that rain waters my lawn for free regardless of whether I have a barrel.

Holy good God it’s not totally fabricated. https://www.truthorfiction.com/collecting-rainwater-is-illeg...

Beneath your land is also a fiction, it takes hundreds of years to accumulate and stretches far beyond the boundaries of your land.

Yeah your house and property sits above a subterranean _lake_. You can't just pull water out of a lake as you please. You shouldm't be able to pull out ground water as you please either.

Look, it's not my pet project, I'm just pointing out that if we decided we needed to track groundwater usage for whatever reason- price, allocation, whatever- it could probably be reasonably done.

There is no reason at all you can't put a meter on a well. None. Everything to do that exists.

I assure you that you will have a very difficult time enforcing permit rules anywhere that is not dense enough to have town water.

Who knows, farmers understand that they essentially compete with their neighbor for groundwater, so maybe they would police eachother & ensure that everyone plays fair & had a meter. Just dreaming.

It's one of the applications for zoning in rural areas.

My parents live in an area where there is no municipal water system. Due to the geology for both water supply and septic systems, they mandate a minimum lot size of 4 acres.

It’s in the middle of nowhere. My neighbor was the mayor who implemented it, with the goal of encouraging development.

Encouraging development with minimum lot sizes of 4 acres?

Or simply charge more for the license itself.

You 'sell' or 'gift' the rights to all groundwater in a suitably defined watershed and that controlling entity sets prices (and at least partially enforces their rights). The controlling entity could be a government organization. A private organization would need either some kind of cooperative police apparatus (with the ability to detect, and stop, violations of the controlling entity's rights to the groundwater).