It’s services, tech, health care, education, retail and transportation.” “If you look at what generates the economic vitality of the state, it’s not our farming sector. “Lots of people have warm and generous feelings towards farmers and rural life, but the vast majority of Utahns live in cities and suburbs,” Lozada said. Lozada and others think so, but it would require overhauling Utah’s 19th-century water law so that farmers are rewarded for using less water, and reducing subsidies on the water they are entitled to use. Up to 1 million acre-feet were used to produce this hay, depending on how many tons this share of the harvest’s value represents, according to Lozada’s calculations.Ĭould Utah put that water to better use elsewhere without leaving agriculture producers high and dry? (An acre-foot is the amount of water it takes to cover one acre of land with one foot of water.)Īccording to federal data, 29% of Utah’s hay harvest, by value, is exported overseas, with about two-thirds going to China. That means it takes 1.38 acre-feet, or about 450,000 gallons, to produce a ton of alfalfa - about as much water as two Utah homes typically use in a year. While Utah’s urban dwellers must rein in their notoriously high use of water, the state won’t solve its water woes without serious concessions from the agricultural sector, according to University of Utah economics professor Gabriel Lozada.Īlfalfa and hay account for 68% of the 5.1 million acre-feet of water diverted every year in Utah, Lozada’s research has found. The 2.4 million tons of annual hay the state produces plays a vital role supporting Utah’s agricultural economy, especially ranchers and dairies, but it comes at a price, experts say. But that represents just 0.2% of the state’s gross domestic product - on par with revenue generated by amusement parks. Alfalfa and other types of hay are by far Utah’s most valuable agricultural crop, worth nearly half a billion dollars last year. The Reeses are among the state’s 9,300 family hay-growing operations, which consume most of Utah’s water resources. “The key question is how do we save the Great Salt Lake and all the darts and arrows point back to agriculture,” one Farm Bureau official said at a recent public meeting. As Utah’s climate changes, less water is available, while municipal and industrial demands keep growing and lakes shrivel into puddles. Small farms line the valley bottom, looking much the way it looked during Dixon’s time.īut these days, growers have an increasingly complicated relationship with the liquid asset so vital to their survival. It’s a place of bucolic beauty where artist Maynard Dixon lived in the 1940s creating his famous landscape paintings at a rustic retreat he built not far from where the Reeses now work the soil. The Utah Farm Bureau’s Kane County president, Reese, and her husband John farm and run cattle in this 13-mile-long valley framing the Virgin River’s east fork as it flows between the Markagunt and Paunsaugunt plateaus, the top two steps of the Grand Staircase. You actually have to walk up and down your field to check and make sure that the water is getting where it needs to go and with a shovel.” “It is not something you can just turn on and leave like a wheel line or a pivot. “It’s really hard to control your water,” says Reese during a recent tour of one of her stubbled plots in Utah’s Long Valley, not long after bringing in the last harvest of the season. Lacking a pressurized irrigation system, the Kane County ranchers roam the alfalfa fields guiding where the water goes to ensure the fields are flood irrigated as efficiently as possible. When the water is running through the ditches connecting her fields to Virgin River tributaries, Dusty Reese and her family don’t get a lot of sleep. 24, 2022 and is republished with permission. This story was originally published by the Salt Lake Tribune on Nov. This article is the first in a series supported by The Water Desk, an independent journalism initiative based at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism. Learn more about our grants for journalists This story was supported by the Water Desk’s grants program.
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