Dustin Christensen has farmed crops in Richfield his entire life.
“Farming and ranching is a tough way to make a living, but it is a great way of life,” he said. “It is a great way to raise your children. Teach them how to work, teach them about life.”
However, his grandkids are about to learn a hard lesson in sacrifice after this winter, which provided Utah with its lowest-ever snowpack. It peaked three weeks early on March 9 at 8.4 inches, half of what it usually is.
“It's pretty depressing when you're dependent on growing a crop, and you need water to grow a crop,” he said. “It's financially very straining, emotionally straining, mentally straining.”
Christensen said his 1,100-acre farm relies on water from the Sevier River and winter snowpack.
Two-thirds of his land is usually dedicated to growing corn, but this year he won't plant any because his water allocations are a “third of normal.” Instead, he’ll sow crops like wheat instead.
“Those grain crops don't bring the dollars per acre that a corn crop brings,” he said.
Corn can bring him around $1,300 per acre. In comparison, he said the grains he’s planting now will likely “only gross about $300 an acre.”
Across Utah, farming is under mounting pressure. An aging workforce, shrinking farmland and volatile markets have long strained the industry. Now, rising fuel and fertilizer costs tied to the war in Iran are compounding those challenges. Add the lowest recorded snowpack into the mix, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for family farms to survive.
Drought itself is nothing new to Utah. For over 20 years, the state has wrestled with persistent dry conditions. But while farmers can usually count on some winter snowfall to carry them through the growing season, this year, that cushion is gone.
Kelly Pehrson, commissioner of the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food, and his colleagues have been visiting struggling rural communities. They hold public meetings about drought management, but there’s no magic button to solve the problem.
“What we're hearing and what we're seeing is people hoping we could just fast forward through this year and start over next year,” he said. “But we're just trying to, again, bring a message of hope and that we're here to listen and we'll find ways to help them get through it.”
Pehrson said there are state programs available to help farmers throughout the year, including an emergency loan program to help producers cover “out of the norm” costs like hauling water or buying hay.
From water management districts to national parks to backyard gardeners, Utahns at every level are reckoning with how to limit water consumption this dry year. Roughly 75% to 80% of Utah’s water goes to agriculture, largely for irrigated crops like alfalfa, and critics argue that this has to change. Meanwhile, farmers say they’ve become the scapegoats for a broader water crisis and argue that their water use has declined over time.
Lawmakers have also taken long-term steps to make agriculture more efficient, like the Agricultural Water Optimization Program, which now saves more than 125,000 acre-feet of water each year, according to state data.
This year, the state will have to use all the tools it can.
“We don't know how to approach it just because we've never seen it, but we're just going in with messages of hope that our programs can help them get through this year,” Pehrson said.
Christensen said he and his family will make it, but he fully appreciates that “there’s going to be some losses.” He’s worried about the impact the season will have on his community, whose economy relies on agriculture.
“This drought is going to be a huge domino effect on all of rural Utah, and not just Utah, but the whole western United States,” he said.
