Think Utah farmers should do without irrigation? Here’s what that looks like

This article is published through the Colorado River Collaborative, a solutions journalism initiative supported by the Janet Quinney Lawson Institute for Land, Water, and Air at Utah State University. See all of our stories about how Utahns are impacted by the Colorado River at greatsaltlakenews.org/coloradoriver.

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Shay Lewis waded into a stand of thigh-high wheat, snatched one of the seed heads and tossed some grain into his mouth.

“Those are plump kernels,” he said, gesturing to the harvest waiting in his field. “This is what it should look like.”

Hundreds of acres of ripe, golden grain — and not an irrigation system in sight.

Agriculture consumes roughly three-quarters of all diverted water in Utah. So as states fight over the Colorado River and climate change intensifies drought, farms have come under increased scrutiny about how much water they use to irrigate their fields.

But not this one.

“The only way it grows is we have to have rainfall,” Lewis said. “That thunderstorm you just heard right behind us is what puts the water on the field.”

With dryland farming, you plant seeds and rely on the heavens rather than sprinklers. That’s how the Lewis family has been growing wheat near Monticello for generations.

“One should never pass up an opportunity to have a rainstorm — ever,” Lewis said. “Even if it ruins the family reunion, it’s still better.”

In this part of southeast Utah, dryland farming is the norm. Just 0.3% of San Juan County farmland is irrigated, compared to 23% in Utah County, 25% in Cache County and 40% in Wayne County.

Dryland techniques can work for wheat and other small grains, but alfalfa needs to be irrigated in Utah’s dry climate. Farmers around Monticello, however, don’t have enough water for large-scale irrigation. So while alfalfa is the top crop statewide, it’s not as common here. In San Juan County, wheat grown for grain covers more than five times as many acres as crops grown for hay and forage.

As population growth and drought threaten Utah’s water supply, some have called for an end to irrigated alfalfa. So at first glance, dryland wheat might seem like the kind of water-saving solution the state is searching for. But it’s not quite that simple.

First, there are environmental challenges.

Monticello gets around 15 inches of precipitation a year, and like much of Utah, this area has become drier and hotter in recent decades.

So, when farmers like Lewis depend solely on the weather for their success, it’s a gamble.

“There’s just no way to predict it,” he said. “The things that you learn from the year before, they change the next year. You have to readapt, and you go, ‘I feel like I’m doing this for the first time.’”

His family tries to conserve what little moisture is in the soil by limiting how much they plow. Modern wheat varieties bred for dry conditions can help too — the hybrid grown in his field didn’t exist 20 years ago, he said.

A future with more frequent, more intense drought could make farming without irrigation even harder. Lewis saw glimpses of that during Utah’s severe multiyear dry spell a few years ago.

“In the olden days, about every six or seven years you would have one year of drought. That was fine. Everybody figured a way around that. But when you had four [years] in a row or five, then it gets really difficult,” he said. “The farmers look at [their crop] and go, ‘Is that going to make it, or is it going to burn up in the field?’”

Then, there are economic obstacles.

Even in a year when the dryland harvest is good, getting paid for it can be a job in itself.

Southeast Utah has wheat farmers, but it doesn’t have much market infrastructure to help them sell their grain. In Lewis’ case, he has to transport his wheat more than 370 miles each way to a mill in Logan to make any money.

“Even though you raise a crop, you still have to get it from here to the buyer,” he said. “That’s a challenge because it still requires about the same amount of effort as growing the crop.”

That’s a struggle Reagan Wytsalucy has seen a lot among farmers in Monticello.

“Sometimes, they don’t even break even,” the assistant professor with Utah State University extension in San Juan County said. “More often than not, they’re in the red.”

Utah’s agricultural economy just isn’t set up to support wheat farming the same as alfalfa, she said, and the extra overhead costs can wipe out their profits.

In the latest census of agriculture report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, farms in San Juan County lost $3.4 million in the year 2022. The average farm lost more than $4,500 that year — a 246% decline in income since 2017. That comes with plenty of mental and emotional stress, Wytsalucy said, and families often need to take non-farming jobs to make ends meet.

San Juan is Utah’s second-largest agricultural county in terms of farmland acres, but it ranks 19 out of the state’s 29 counties for agricultural revenue.

“Even though they’re putting out all this output, their expenditures more often than not end up being higher than what they’re going to get back,” Wytsalucy said. “Especially with drought conditions, that just amplifies how much more of a loss you have at the end of a season than you would if you actually had access to irrigation.”

These drawbacks illustrate why dryland wheat is not a cure-all for Utah’s water woes, she said. There’s no financial reason for farmers who have water rights for irrigating alfalfa to switch to a higher-risk, lower-reward crop. Because wheat is a low-value product compared to alfalfa, she said there’s also less incentive for the state to implement programs that would support more wheat farming.

A 2018 study from New Mexico State University suggested that adding irrigation to dryland grains such as wheat could nearly double their yields. But even if Monticello farmers wanted to start irrigating, they couldn’t. The water coming from the nearby Blue Mountains gets consumed by farms and homes around Blanding, Wytsalucy said. Monticello farmers are toward the back of the line, and there’s not much left.

While some Utah farmers are experimenting with alternative crops, a majority of the state’s harvested acres continue to grow alfalfa, and it would require a large-scale shift in the state’s agricultural economy for that to change. In the meantime, Utah is heavily investing in efforts to help farmers modernize their irrigation equipment to better conserve water.

Dryland farmer Shay Lewis understands that irrigated agriculture often gets a bad rap. But he doesn’t blame those farmers.

“I don’t fault anybody, really,” he said. “I think, generally speaking, everybody’s trying to do the best to conserve water with the resources we have.”

He believes it’ll take everyone to tackle Utah’s water challenges, while still growing the food people need to eat.

“Farmers are trying to become more efficient. You can’t get mad at them for what they’re trying to do. At the same time, people in the city: Are you being as efficient with your water as the farmers are trying to do? Do we need to water our lawn five times a week?”

In another of his golden fields, Lewis climbed into the cab of his towering green combine and started the motor. For this wheat, harvest day had arrived.

At the front of the mammoth machine, equipment that works like a giant hair trimmer swooshed through the wheat heads, cutting grain and funneling it to a storage container in the back.

“I did something good,” Lewis said. “There’s wheat going into the bin.”

After all the work that has gone into this field and all the risks that come with dryland farming, it’s a welcome sight.

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Contributing: KSL TV photographer Mark Wetzel.