When Karen Goodfellow moved to St. George a decade ago, she and her husband planted grass in their backyard.
Now, they’re swapping it out.
“It is a big project. We're in our 70s,” Goodfellow said as she walked through her landscaping project. “So it's keeping us active, for sure.”
With help from friends and an excavator, they tore out around 1,000 square feet of turf this spring after being approved for a local rebate program. It pays residents up to $2 per square foot to ditch irrigated lawns for water-friendly landscaping.
“We were struggling to keep it alive,” she said as she motioned to the bare spot where grass used to be. “So it was an easy decision to tear it out. But we fought with it for a long time, because we had grandkids that would come over and play on it.”
Ultimately, though, she wants her community to have enough water in the future that her grandkids could choose to live here when they grow up, too.
Goodfellow is trying to grow clover, which should require less water than turf once it’s established. Along the edges of the plot, she put in drought-tolerant rock penstemon and red autumn sage. Everything now gets fed by a more efficient drip irrigation system, rather than sprinklers.
With the fast-growing county’s primary water source, the Virgin River, essentially tapped out, she said everyone needs to find ways to stretch the remaining water into the future.
“It's not something where we're kind of playing a game. It’s reality for us,” said Goodfellow, who also volunteers to lead the water program with local advocacy group Conserve Southwest Utah. “This is really the time to act.”
And more of her neighbors are beginning to join her.
The Washington County Water Conservancy District says the area has replaced 2.9 million square feet of irrigated turf since its rebate program began in late 2022 — enough to save an estimated 125 million gallons of water per year.
That’s a good sign, said district Conservation Manager Doug Bennett.
“I think what we're seeing is the beginning of a culture shift,” he said. “We're finding out from surveying our customers that the leading way they find out about the program is hearing from someone else.”
The more residents take the plunge into lawn-free living, the more it could snowball through word of mouth.
Washington County is not only replacing more lawns than other parts of Utah, it’s doing it at a per capita rate that’s faster than Las Vegas — a city where total water use has declined even as population has grown.
“Las Vegas is a world leader,” said Bennett, who previously worked on southern Nevada’s water-saving efforts. “It'd be considered the pinnacle of conservation programming in the West.”
Increasing conservation is a key pillar of Washington County’s 20-year plan to have enough water for the larger population it’s expected to see by the 2040s. The district expects efforts like the lawn rebate to provide around a quarter of the new water the area will need.
Ditching grass also makes financial sense, Bennett said. That’s because it costs a lot more to bring in new water — say, buying water rights from a local farmer — than it does to save water that’s already here. Other projects to clean and reuse water, such as the district’s $1 billion wastewater recycling plan, also require massive investments.
The next frontier for the lawn rebate program will be getting more businesses and golf courses on board, Bennett said. A vast majority of the district’s 2,300 projects so far have been at single-family homes.
Even with the program’s early success, it still only represents a small fraction of the county’s conservation potential. The district estimates there’s around 72 million square feet of non-functional, or ornamental, grass.
“You've got tens of millions of square feet of grass that’s a potential target for the program, and you have single-digit millions that have been converted so far,” he said. “We have a substantial way to go.”
This year’s dry, hot conditions have increased the urgency.
Since the beginning of June, the average high temperature in St. George has been nearly 102 degrees. The city has received only 0.22 inches of rain during that time. Following a historically dry winter, all of Washington County has been in severe or extreme drought since January.
While water supplies aren’t in dire shape yet, increased summer usage has begun to take a toll. The area’s largest reservoir, Sand Hollow, has seen its level drop more than 10% from where it was in May. Quail Creek Reservoir has dropped 14%. And the region is forecast to see above-average heat and below-average precipitation through the fall.
That worries Goodfellow, who would like to see more of the county’s roughly 200,000 residents rethink how their yard could help southwest Utah survive a hotter, drier future.
To that end, she’s also helping lead the local Parade of Gardens, a countywide event that showcases neighbors’ desert landscaping with trees, flowers and cacti, to help others imagine what could replace their grass.
“There are a lot of people that don't want to do this because they don't want to save water to have people just move here from California and have new houses built,” Goodfellow said. “It shouldn't be about that. It should be about, ‘What can we do to sustain life here?’”
