The soil at the Wilkerson Farm in Orem isn’t any old dirt. It’s sandy loam.
It’s the kind of dirt people pay “big bucks” for to put in their gardens, said Rachel Wilkerson as it fell through her fingers. Utah State University soil expert Janis Boettinger agrees that it’s special and said it’s relatively uncommon in this part of Utah County.
But as good as the soil is for growing things like carrots, potatoes, onions and beets, this farmland might soon become housing.
Because people are flocking to Utah County.
The Provo-Orem-Lehi metropolitan area was the fastest-growing place in the state last year, and it ranked fifth in the nation for percentage growth. That’s according to U.S. Census Bureau data analyzed by the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute.
Building homes for all those new residents has come with a tradeoff: shrinking farmland. Utah County lost 47,030 acres of farmland between 2002 and 2022, the latest numbers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
From a bird’s eye view, the 14-acre Wilkerson Farm makes up some of the last green space in this part of Orem and Provo. Farmland there is boxed in by Utah Lake to the west, the FrontRunner train tracks to the east, a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints temple to the north and housing creeping in on all sides.
The Wilkersons are leasing their farm and want to keep going, but the landowner, Candide Charitable Enterprise LLC, wants to sell.
Wilkerson thinks that would be a big loss for the community.
“So what you're doing is you're cashing in the now and cutting off the past, and you're cutting off the future,” she said. “And what that does, if you cut the roots off a plant, it dies.”
But the Wilkersons haven’t been able to farm this land in two years.
They’ve struggled to sell produce locally and haven’t gotten enough interest in making it a community supported farm that would offer produce shares for a subscription. So they started a fall fair with rides, a corn maze and a pumpkin patch. While 50,000 people come every year, it still hasn’t been enough.
Al Switzler started the Candide Charitable Enterprise to grow food for Tabitha’s Way, a local food pantry he also co-founded.
“It was an enterprise that lost money every year, and we didn't get produce that we needed many years,” he said.
Switzler said he has tried for eight years to make the Wilkersons’ farm work, but despite the good soil, it just wasn’t big enough.
“There's lots of places that are great for raising vegetables, but if it's not financially viable, you know, who's going to subsidize it?” he said.
Since food insecurity has grown substantially in Utah County, he plans to sell the farm property to continue to fund Tabitha’s Way. A sale could bring in a lot of money — the land’s value doubled between 2021 and 2022, and it’s now worth $2.4 million as agricultural land.
To sell the land for housing, however, the Orem City Council would have to approve a zoning change. After a March public hearing, the city’s planning commission recommended the land not be rezoned for single-family housing.
They cited traffic, safety concerns near the train tracks, and the value of having open land in a community.
Commission member Rodney Erickson disagreed with the assessment that the city has enough housing. During that March meeting, he said “we have a lot of housing and communities in our city that are rundown and running down rapidly.”
Plus, most of the open land in that area is already gone. Switzler is just one of the last to want to sell.
Erickson added, “I also wonder, are we trying to close the barn door after all the animals have escaped?”
John Bennion, research director at the nonprofit Conserve Utah Valley, thinks farmland versus housing doesn’t have to be an either/or situation.
“In terms of long-range planning, we're cutting ourselves short by not thinking about the future of our children having access to green spaces or agriculture,” he said.
Bennion said cities would have to be intentional with planning and smart growth. To him, that’s high-density housing, which sometimes proves to be an unpopular idea.
“There's a plan floated for a Utah City where Vineyard is. That would be walkable distance, with high-density housing, and you could walk to the grocery, walk to stores. That would be a wonderful plan,” he said, even though Bennion is not in favor of the part of the Vineyard plan that affects Utah Lake.
After planning, he said cities would have to protect farmland. Cities or counties could buy land. There are also conservation easements, when a farm owner sells the development rights to land, so it’s protected indefinitely.
Conserve Utah Valley is currently helping Cascade Farms in Provo do that, and over in Orem, Cherry Hill Farm is already in an easement.
If the community wants to keep agricultural land, it might be too late for the Wilkerson Farm. Switzler doesn’t see an easement as the best thing for Tabitha’s Way, and his mission to fight food insecurity. Someone did approach him about the possibility of purchasing the land, but by then, Switzler said his enterprise had already entered a legal agreement with a developer.
But if the farm were somehow able to stay, Rachel Wilkerson said they have more ideas to try to make things work financially. She believes it’s important for a community to have a local food source.
“The quality of the food that you get from local sources by far, by far, is better for you in every way,” she said.
Orem City said at the earliest, the city council will vote on the land rezoning proposal in May.
