Note to readers • This story is made possible through a partnership between The Salt Lake Tribune and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.

The Great Salt Lake can’t be saved without buy-in from farmers.

But when the lake hit record-low elevations in 2022 and 2023, farmers found themselves increasingly under scrutiny by urban-dwellers over the amount of water they use, the types of crops they grow and to whom they sell their harvests.

Those tensions are creating anxiety among people whose way of life already faces pressure from growing cities and developers eyeing fields and orchards as places for new subdivisions. And it could ultimately backfire on efforts to restore the Great Salt Lake to a healthy elevation, according to research published this month in the Journal of Rural Studies.

“Farmers, they’re looking around and they feel like they’re a dying species,” said Bryn Watkins, a University of Georgia Ph.D. student studying crop and soil sciences and lead author of the study. “The scapegoating has been detrimental to the discourse, and farmers are heartbroken by it.”

Collaborating with the Utah State University Extension, Watkins interviewed 15 farmers across the Great Salt Lake watershed in 2024 — six from the Bear River basin, the most agriculturally productive region of the watershed; six from the Weber River basin, which has a mix of cities and farmland; and three from the Jordan River basin, which has the densest population.

Across the board, farmers’ biggest source of stress wasn’t drought and scarcity, even following the bone-dry years of 2021 and 2022. The largest threat to their way of life, the farmers reported, was development pressure.

“‘Resources wax and wane,’” Watkins recalled the farmers telling her. “‘We’re used to dealing with Mother Nature, but we can’t compete with the marketplace, and we can’t compete with real estate.’”

Fields of homes vs. fields of hay

The interviews revealed a deepening tension between rural and urban communities. Farmers bristle at the talking points that they only provide around 9% of Utah’s gross domestic product or that their work is harming the environment. They also don’t fully trust state lawmakers, where a large portion of the seats at the Legislature are held by land developers and real estate investors. They are skeptical of government initiatives like the Agriculture Water Optimization Program.

Farmers feel that their livelihoods are the sacrifice Salt Lake City is willing to make “to protect its own,” the study notes.

In search of solutions for the shriveling Great Salt Lake, which has lost about half its volume, Utahns often view alfalfa as the villain. Around 5% to 14% of Utah’s hay is exported to other countries, mostly China, although some urban residents assert it is much higher without evidence.

Farmers contend they are growing what the mostly local market demands. Alfalfa feeds the cows that produce the burgers, steaks, cheese and ice cream Utahns enjoy.

“There’s a disconnect,” Watkins said. “We’re also participants in the food system.”

Agriculture also uses about 65% of the water that would otherwise flow to the lake, according to data from the Great Salt Lake Strike Team. But farmers who participated in the study suspected any water they leased or sold to benefit the lake would ultimately be diverted to support additional housing development.

“[Great] Salt Lake’s everybody’s problem,” the study quotes a farmer saying. “But you need to understand, even though farmers up here conserve water, the chances of that making it to the Salt Lake is slim to none.”

[Read more: Farmers are skeptical about participating in water leasing to save the Great Salt Lake. Here’s why.]

The Beehive State will need to build about 840,000 new homes in the next three decades to meet the projected demands of a ballooning population, according to Envision Utah.

The growing urbanization in the Great Salt Lake basin has farmers wondering whether they are actually the source of water shortages in the region, or whether all the unchecked growth around them is to blame.

“Farming’s not getting bigger,” the study quotes another farmer saying. “Why do we have a water problem now?”

In its 2026 report, the Great Salt Lake Strike team increased its estimate of how much water is used by cities and businesses. The team now said municipal and industrial users consume 27% of the basin’s water, up from 17% in its 2025 report.

“It’s not just a single entity and not a single industry that needs to help step up and fix this, we’re all in this together,” Joel Ferry, commissioner of the Utah Department of Natural Resources, said during a drought update in April. “The strike team ... it’s getting closer and closer to [showing] the reality on the ground of what is actually occurring.”

Farmers hold some of the most senior water rights in Utah, many dating back a century or more. As the largest water users in the basin, they are crucial to helping the lake refill. Their water use is also the most flexible — they can stop irrigating during the hottest summer months, let their alfalfa go dormant and lease water to keep rivers and lakes full. Farm fields create habitat for birds and wildlife as well. Irrigation trickles underground, helping aquifers and streams recharge.

That’s not the case with urban water use, which is largely fixed and inflexible.

“A home or business is very hardened,” Ferry said. “Their tap, when they turn it on, if there isn’t water, there are problems.”

Farmers, by contrast, are used to making cuts in their water use, sometimes significant ones, Ferry said.

With a warming climate and rampant resource consumption worldwide, Watkins said it is important to safeguard open spaces and sustainable food production.

“We don’t have many spaces left where we are deliberately cultivating a relationship with the planet,” Watkins said.

Farmers interviewed became emotional, Watkins said, at the thought of selling off their last few parcels so the subdivisions keep multiplying.

[Read more: As sprawl takes root, say goodbye to orchards, fresh fruit and a Utah tradition]

“They love the land,” Watkins said. “They love the water.”

Watkins began her research by exploring whether farmers were open to leasing their land to solar panels to help contribute to a low-carbon future and simultaneously save water in a drought-stricken state. But the farmers were resistant to the idea of taking field for growing food out of production. She pivoted to asking them about transitioning to alternative crops. Utah’s top agricultural product, alfalfa, has a thirsty reputation.

“We discovered pretty quickly that without the market support, then that wasn’t a very viable option,” Watkins said. “They said, ‘Yeah, well, we’ve got good land for quinoa, for example, but we don’t have a market for quinoa. So we’re not going to grow quinoa.’”

Fallowing fields — or taking them out of agriculture entirely — was also a nonstarter.

“That was the F-word,” Watkins said.

‘Under the thumb of development’

But the surveys revealed some options the state can consider to empower farmers and support the Great Salt Lake’s recovery, researchers said.

Conservation easements are an especially effective tool, said Roslynn McCann, a sustainable communities professor and extension specialist at USU who mentored Watkins and co-authored the study.

“It would be amazing if our state put some actual economic teeth behind it as an incentive,” McCann said.

Those easements protect land from development in perpetuity, while farmers retain all other property rights. Importantly, it keeps their water use flexible so it can continue to be leased for environmental benefits.

The researchers also suggested incentives for smarter, denser urban growth that doesn’t require converting farmland to development.

“We have so much to learn in the United States about developing in a more beautiful and compact way,” McCann said, “and Utah can really go a long way with that.”

Around 20% of Utah’s agricultural lands, or about 2.7 million acres, has been lost to development in the last six decades. Shielding farms from market forces that prioritize profit, Watkins said, can better align agriculture with the environmental ethics needed to save the Great Salt Lake and other ecologies depleted by unrestrained consumption.

“Ultimately, the lake is also under the thumb of development,” Watkins said. “That will come for the lake as much as it has for farmers.”

This article is published through the Great Salt Lake Collaborative with funding from Love the Lake, an initiative of the non-profit Great Salt Lake Alliance. Editorial decisions are made independently by the Collaborative and partner newsrooms.