"This is not a good day," the fourth-generation sheep grower and farmer growls. "Last night a raccoon got up in there and shorted out the electric motor. Looks like two wells are out, blown fuses all down the line."

An electrician has been called out from Logan, 90 minutes and 50 miles over winding northern Utah mountain roads. The early prognosis is ugly: new bearings, at least; maybe replacing the 70 horsepower motor that helps water 350 acres of grass and alfalfa. None of this is cheap.

"Damned raccoons," Willis barks. "But it's always something, you know?"

Equipment breaks down; short growing seasons and hard, cold winters rule in meadows rising toward 7,000 feet elevation and higher; regulations for use of critical public grazing lands continually tighten, and then there are the predators that further reduce already tight profits, if there are any at all.

These days, Willis and others working the land and livestock of the state will tell you it takes more than being a farmer to run and keep a farm. Second, even third jobs are typical, and critical to making it today in rural Utah.

The 2002 U.S. Department of Agriculture census, the most recent available, found two-thirds of the Beehive State's 17,699 farms lost money. Nationally, 53 percent of the country's 2.12 million farms end the year in the red.

In 2002, acreage devoted to farming in Utah had dipped to 11.7 million acres, down 300,000 acres from 1997. The state's harvested acreage also plunged 152,000 acres to 961,000 acres - even as total overall farm production costs rose 30 percent between 1997 and 2002.

Every year, Willis and his son, Brandon, lose 70 to 90 head, or roughly 10 percent, of their 1,000 sheep to the coyotes, bears and cougars prowling the mountains enfolding the 20-mile-long, 8-mile-wide lake on the Utah-Idaho border.

With lambs going for $140 a head, the toll of tooth and claw can mean the difference between modest or no profits. It is a microcosm of today's agricultural reality: While herding sheep was enough to keep body and soul together for the first Willises to arrive in Rich County about 125 years ago, the rural lifestyle today demands flexibility, and substantial outside income.

Armed with a master's degree in agricultural industries from Utah State University, Clark Willis bought out his aging father, Elijah, in 1983. To the family sheep operation he added hay, feed grains and raspberries. A past president of the Utah Wool Growers Association, he had sold real estate, and his wife, Patty, taught at both public school and collegiate levels to make ends meet.

"You can't just farm or ranch anymore," Willis says. "We aren't rich, but we've been lucky, fairly successful."

That is not the case for many struggling to maintain Utah family farms and ranches.

Randy Parker, chief executive of the Utah Farm Bureau, says family-owned farms and ranches nationwide are under economic stress - but Utah agriculture faces its own, additional set of challenges, among them that 70 percent of the state is owned by state and federal government.

"Our limited private and arable lands means smaller economic units [for farmers], and our folks have had to generate outside income for a long time," Parker says.

"And the average age of our farmers in Utah is rising, too, about 56 now."

That trend has the bureau stronger than ever against the so-called "death tax," the sometimes heavy assessments levied by government in inheritances. "The ability to transfer [farms] from one generation to the next is becoming a real challenge," Parker says.

Urban encroachment by a growing population - along with the temptation of rising real estate prices for cash-strapped rural property owners - also threatens to chip away at the shrinking acreage under agricultural use in the state.

"We're faced with losing our agricultural way of life, and along with the mountain-to-mountain rooftop and blacktop mentality comes lessening of air and water quality," Parker warns.

It is the rural lifestyle, and its benefits for their five children that has kept Valjay and Raelyn Rigby willing to make the sacrifices needed to keep their five-generation, 2,000-acre farm in the tiny Cache County community of Newton.

"You have to be able to wear a lot of hats nowadays," says Valjay. "You can't just go out and drive a tractor anymore."

That means the dawn-to-dusk work of the Rigby ancestors who first settled the area 20 miles northwest of Logan won't do today.

In addition to raising crops of alfalfa, wheat, barley and corn and 70 head of cattle, the Rigbys today scramble to bring in needed cash from off-farm sources.

Valjay has taught computer classes at the nearby Bridgerland Applied Technology Center, and adds stints as a firefighter and emergency medical technician to those of Cache Farm Bureau president, water board member and scoutmaster.

When Raelyn's not keeping the family's near-century old, two-story red brick home, she works as a registered nurse and helps her husband with yet another new enterprise: raising pheasants for a private hunting operation, in cooperation with neighboring spreads.

"Some days, I wonder, but it is worth it," she says. "It gets into your blood. I love the work ethic living here gives my kids, and we all take care of each other out here. It's good to know almost all your neighbors."

In southern Utah's Wayne County, Paul and Liz Pace long ago made an uneasy peace with the demands of the 21st century family farm. With a laugh of resignation, they say that the first law of agricultural economics today is, "Never let your ranch get bigger than the job in town can support."

To keep alive the redrock country ranch his Mormon pioneer ancestors began in the 1880s near Bicknell, Paul supplements his income working at the USDA's Farm Service Agency office in Loa, and is a representative for Southwestern Utah Telephone. Liz chips in with her paychecks as an emergency medical technician and admissions counselor for the Aspen Achievement Academy, an outdoor therapy program for teens.

All that means much of the responsibility for day-to-day ranching duties has fallen on the Pace's three sons, ages 20, 18 and 14.

"Keep your cell phone on to talk with your sons, that's how you run a ranch today," he chuckles.

"But you get to enjoy the sunsets, raise a family, live happy together," Pace adds. "We have incredible neighbors. You live like a king, with the freedom you have here; how do you put a price tag on that?"

Back along the shores of Bear Lake, Clark Willis finally spares a glance at the waves, and savors a cooling breeze on his sunburned, glistening face. Raccoons or not, he smiles.

At 59, he looks forward to handing the heritage to his son, Brandon.

He boasts the 29-year-old already has shown promise, turning a gift of five acres into enough raspberries to put himself through law school at the University of Wyoming.

Brandon, who will complete special post-graduate agricultural law studies at the University of Arkansas next year, plans to work as an attorney long enough to save money and return to buy out his father - just as the elder Willis did more than two decades ago.

Even now, though, the next generation is looking to innovation to keep the rural ideal alive. Brandon says he'll keep sheep as an economic hedge against the vagaries of frost and drought, but he plans to expand the farm's raspberry crops, and eventually add gourmet-quality blackberries and blueberries as well.

"For me, it's the challenge," he says. "There's the soil to consider, different fertilizers. I'll put up with the sheep, but I love raspberries."