WATER POLITICS

The Great Salt Lake is shrinking, and new research published Tuesday reports that saving it requires reducing the amount of farmland that is irrigated in the region. 

In recent decades, climate change and the overconsumption of water from the rivers that feed into the Great Salt Lake have left the largest saline lake in the U.S. with 70 percent less water. The lake now covers just half the expanse it once did. By far the biggest human-caused driver of the lake’s depletion is agriculture, with 71 percent of the water that once replenished it going to farms. Of that, 80 percent goes to alfalfa and hay that primarily feed cattle. 

“When you look at the specifics of agriculture, there’s just one major, big source [irrigated livestock feed crops] for the withdrawals,” said Oregon State University ecologist and distinguished professor William Ripple, a coauthor of the study. 

It’s a similar story across the Western half of the U.S., with the production of alfalfa and hay to feed the nation’s hunger for dairy and beef products driving the decline of rivers, lakes and aquifers from the Colorado River to basins across Arizona.

“What we’re seeing in the Great Salt Lake is a microcosm of the American West, in that water is becoming very scarce because of climate change, and we cannot continue with business as usual now,” Ripple said. 

The decline of the Great Salt Lake drew increased scrutiny in recent years, after the lake hit record lows in 2022. At the time, experts warned that if conditions continued, the lake could be completely dry within 5 years. Environmentalists sued the state over the lake’s decline, arguing it has violated its public trust obligations by threatening a public health crisis and ecological collapse and also filed an Endangered Species Act petition to protect a bird whose declining population is heavily reliant on the Great Salt Lake during its annual migration. 

But the last two years have been wet years, leading to policymakers, including the state’s governor, to downplay the issue, despite continued concern over the future of the lake from academics and environmentalists.

Estimates still show the lake potentially running dry in the coming decades, threatening public health in the region with dust from the drying lakebed that is filled with toxic metals, depriving the thousands of species that rely on the lake of habitat and food and endangering the $2.5 billion in economic activities stemming directly from the Great Salt Lake.

“There’s plenty to worry about and the last couple of years shouldn’t distract us from the fact that we got a really big problem here,” said Brian Richter, lead author of the study and president of the water scarcity group Sustainable Waters.

The Great Salt Lake’s water balance shifted once Mormon settlers arrived in the region in the 1850s, Richter said. Big snow years in the 1980s and 1990s masked some of the decline, but over the past 30 years, the lake’s water levels have dropped by an average of four inches per year. That may not sound like a lot, Richter said, but represents a loss of 10 million acre feet of water during that time period—enough water for roughly 20 million homes in Utah. 

The alfalfa and hay in the region help support around one million head of cattle raised by the roughly 20,000 farmers and ranchers in the region, but the majority of the crop is exported to other states or overseas, while hay grown elsewhere is also imported into the region, the study found. That agricultural production equates to 0.07 percent of Utah’s GDP, they found, and only served only about one percent of the country’s beef supply. In essence, the researchers said, that means staunching the lake’s decline is not about economics or food security, but a cultural issue. 

To stabilize the lake, diversions from the lake’s supplies need to decrease by 35 percent, the researchers found, or roughly 650,000 acre feet. The study highlights four options to achieve that goal focused on changing the crops grown in the region, less cuttings of alfalfa each year, fallowing fields, paying farmers not to irrigate and reducing municipal and industrial consumption.

At a minimum, the options would cost around $100 million per year for 10 years. 

“That seems like a very big price tag, until you start to break it down,” Richter said. “If you divide that by the 3.4 million people that live in Utah, it comes out to be $29 per person per year over the decade. Or if you look at it from the standpoint of the state’s budget, which is close to $30 billion a year, you’re talking about far less than 1 percent of the state’s annual budget.”

Making those cuts will require the help of the other Great Salt Lake Basin states—Idaho and Wyoming—and likely need additional funding from the federal government, similar to what has been happening in the Colorado River Basin, which includes Utah.

And slowing the lake’s decline will require further cuts from all sectors, not just agriculture, Richter said. Farmers have been making the most sensible economic choice they had available, given the price of alfalfa, and they should not be vilified for doing so, he added.

“They feel like they feel like they’ve got a target on their back,” Richter said. “They tend to be very reactive now, very defensive. We have to get beyond that, because there’s no other way to rebalance the Great Salt Lake or the Colorado River or the Central Valley of California or the Rio Grande or any of these water systems that are experiencing severe water scarcity, water shortage problems now, unless we can get farmers on board.”