Kevin Cotner grows alfalfa in Carbon County. But this year, around a third of his family’s farmland hasn’t grown anything.
“It's burnt,” he said as he motioned across the desolate, brown field in front of him. “There's no vegetation there.”
That sounds dire, but for Cotner, the situation makes financial sense.
His field is part of the first batch of farmland enrolled in Utah’s Demand Management Pilot Program. The initiative pays farmers in the state’s Colorado River Basin to leave some of their ground bare so the water they would have used instead flows downstream to Lake Powell.
“It's another cash crop. It's just a different crop than a crop of alfalfa,” he said of the payments. “It's a farm, but it is a business. And we have bills and commitments like any other business does, so it works for us.”
The practice of leaving a field temporarily unplanted and unirrigated is known as fallowing. Utah’s pilot program, which is managed by the Colorado River Authority of Utah, pays enrollees $390 per acre-foot of saved water when they fallow a field. One acre-foot is enough water to cover an acre of ground a foot deep in water and is roughly enough to supply two households for one year.
There aren’t many sure things when farming this part of the desert, Cotner said, especially in a dry year like this. So, knowing the state would pay him for this field helped remove some of the usual uncertainty.
Scott Thayn, another Carbon County farmer in the program, was also drawn by the promise of financial stability.
“It's freed up time and money for me to do improvements on my farm, and that wouldn't have been possible if it wasn't for the funding,” Thayn said.
In all, the pilot program will pay $4.1 million to the first round of applicants approved earlier this year. That includes around a dozen agricultural producers, some of whom — like Cotner — will also participate next year.
The remaining $900,000 from the Legislature’s one-time $5 million allocation will be used to enroll additional farmers in 2026. The river authority received more than a dozen applications for next year and will notify those selected on Dec. 17.
Conserving more water across Utah is vital, especially as the dry state’s limited supply is strained by drought, climate change and overuse. The ongoing negotiations between Utah and six other states over how to split the dwindling Colorado River only heighten the stakes.
“If we can make this type of voluntary program work, then it would mitigate against the possibility of having to do mandatory reductions,” said Marc Stilson, a principal engineer with the Colorado River Authority of Utah.
That’s on some farmers’ minds as well. Besides the financial benefits, Cotner said another major factor in his decision was the possibility of forced water cuts.
“We're just trying to be proactive,” Cotner said. “Hopefully, we can make some kind of difference in the big picture.”
Even with the pilot program’s small start, Stilson said the water savings are adding up. The authority estimates projects in the Price River watershed — where Cotner and Thayn are based — have saved around 4,000 acre-feet of water in 2025. That’s close to 5% of diversions from this watershed in a typical year, Stilson said.
“It is testing the idea of: Can we do water conservation and still support our ag industry, still support our ag producers? Because we want to do both.”
Fallowing compensation programs can be controversial in agriculture, as some folks worry it could cause a permanent loss of a water right (The state has made changes to avoid the use it or lose it problem). But fallowing is fairly common, Stilson said.
Farmers may choose to leave a field bare for various reasons, such as giving their soil a rest between plantings. In most of those cases, it doesn't help farmers’ budgets or the state’s water situation.
“Generally, they take a financial hit when they do that,” Stilson said. “They don't send the water downstream. They lease it to somebody else, or they put it on some other fields.”
The pilot is different, he said, because it marks the water for conservation and measures what goes downstream. The authority has installed additional stream gauges to track the journey of the saved water. A gauge in Carbon County, installed in the spring, is one of five added with help from the U.S. Geological Survey this year, Stilson said. The funding came from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law signed by President Joe Biden.
A big part of what the state hopes to gain from this pilot is information — testing farmers’ interest in voluntary water conservation, seeing how they use it in practice and learning how Utah can help them do it. For example, Cotner and Thayn both would like the program to have a longer planning horizon, so they could know what their fields will be doing several years down the road rather than just a year or two in advance. And Stilson said the state will consider that type of feedback about how to tweak the program if it extends beyond 2026.
The learning experience hasn’t all been rosy, though.
The program estimated it would conserve 10,548 acre-feet of water in 2025, but that didn’t happen, largely because of Mother Nature. One project on the Duchesne River was supposed to release 4,500 acre-feet of water downstream. Due to drought, only around 900 acre-feet of water was sent. There have also been delays in paperwork approval with the Utah Division of Water Rights, which will allow the authority to protect the saved water on its way to Lake Powell.
Stilson remains optimistic that the program can make a meaningful difference for Utah’s water situation as more farmers get on board and see it work for themselves and their neighbors.
“I think they can do it,” he said. “I really believe that they're very innovative, and once they see the problem and understand it, they can tackle it.”
This story was reported in partnership with KSL-TV and the Colorado River Collaborative, with support from The Water Desk at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
