Agriculture uses 80% of global water resources, driving several water management challenges across the world. These challenges require the exchange of effective practices. We found that California's Tulare Lake Basin (TLB) and Mexico's Nazas-Aguanaval watershed share key features, leading us to propose the TLB as a model of climate resilience. After contrasting the policies for TLB with those for Nazas-Aguanaval, we found that no constrained pricing policy proposal exists for the Nazas-Aguanaval watershed. We apply a hydro-economic model using Positive Mathematical Programming to support an incentive structure for reducing water use in agriculture while maximizing profits. The optimal crop policy could reduce water demand by 20%, with a trade-off of an 11% reduction in profits. This would save 185.4 hm3/year, which represents 90% of the volume required for an ongoing infrastructure project for urban water supply in the watershed. Additionally, implementing a price of 14 USD/dam3 could increase the irrigation district's revenue, boosting farmers' profits by up to 16% and district revenue by up to 134%. Our results demonstrate the benefits of applying Positive Mathematical Programming in a semiarid watershed to support water and agriculture policy. This research is a starting point for increasing the climate resilience of watersheds under water and financial stress.