“There’s this mentality that ag’s the problem,” water rights attorney Nathan Bracken said at a FRIENDS of Great Salt Lake forum. “'We need to dry up the farms. They’re the ones that are using all the water, and they’re wasteful and inefficient.’”
‘Sea change’ movements in water law
Irrigators who didn’t use their full allotment of water had to forfeit those rights to someone else who could make use of it. But the pioneer-era “use it or lose it” way of thinking gave farmers no incentive to conserve. They also had no mechanism to dedicate some of their water to protecting wildlife and natural ecosystems., irrigators can lease some or all of their water to benefit the environment, including the Great Salt Lake, for a period up to 10 years without the risk of losing it., created a $40 million trust state agencies potentially can tap to buy or lease water rights for the lake.
Buying all the water rights needed to save the Great Salt Lake will take a “very, very long time,” Bracken said, and the lake needs help now.Agriculture is one of the few industries that offers the flexibility of leasing. Once farmland is turned into subdivisions or factories, much of that flexibility is gone.While agriculture gets a bad rap for using lots of water to grow alfalfa for hay, some lake advocates and researchers say the crop doesn’t deserve its bad rap.
“If they put in a vegetable crop that they spend exorbitant amounts of money to establish and then it fails, or they run out of water,” Yost said, “it’s a huge, huge loss. Whereas, alfalfa reduces that risk.”
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