Be real. If you were a third-generation farmer eking out a living in the dry valleys of Utah, and your most valuable asset was the water rights that attach to your land, giving up that water for a plan that might or might not save the Great Salt Lake from turning to dust would seem foolish at best.
That’s often the way it works. Economic incentives that push individuals in a certain direction simultaneously do serious damage to the larger culture or environment. Expecting a small number of us to sacrifice their economic lives for the greater good is neither fair nor realistic.
That is when the culture, through its government, has to step in and put its thumb on the scales. To change the incentives so that using less water by growing less cattle-feeding alfalfa makes more economic sense to individual farmers than a system that gives them no rational alternative to the status quo.
The Great Salt Lake is continuing to shrink. The threat to the economy, to the ecosystem, to the lungs of all of us who breathe the air in Utah and beyond, is clear and monumental.
A couple of good water years haven’t changed the overall direction of the lake’s ecosystem. No responsible leadership will rely on the vagaries of our climate or expect the deity to hear our prayers.
It is past time for the state of Utah to take action. And that means finding a way to change the economy of our rural areas so that less water goes into cattle feed and more — much more — flows to the Great Salt Lake.
More than 70 percent of the water that would otherwise be flowing into the lake is diverted to agricultural use. Most of that is used to grow alfalfa. Most of that is used to feed cattle — mostly hereabouts, but also some in Asia and the Middle East — to produce beef and dairy products.
It’s not that the state hasn’t done anything. It has put what sounded like significant amounts of taxpayer money into subsidizing more efficient irrigation systems for farmers and offered alfalfa growers real cash money to let some of the water they would have poured onto their crops flow instead to the parched lake.
But it hasn’t been enough. Not nearly enough.
Farmers, understandably, don’t like being told that the decline of the lake is their fault. And even if they can make some money by giving up the water they are otherwise entitled to use, growers reasonably wonder if the water they give up won’t just be sprinkled onto some other, less cooperative, farmers’ acres. Or onto thousands of lawns and parking strips in that new city that’s just been carved out of what was once a neighbor’s farm.
That’s why Utah needs a careful, detailed and, frankly, expensive plan. Pay alfalfa growers in amounts larger enough to get their attention. Sketch out, in great specificity, where the water they give up will go. Show them that what they are giving up benefits them and the state.
And, in our back pocket, a plan to force the sale of water rights — at a fair market price — by anyone still not cooperating.
We don’t have to go very far to get such a plan. Utah has experts at its universities, public and private, chomping at the bit to do that work.
All we need is the political leadership, from the governor’s office and the legislature, to set them to it.
Editorials represent the opinions of The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board, which operates independently from the newsroom.
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