Newly appointed Great Salt Lake Commissioner Hannah Freeze has two things on her to-do list: fill the lake, and fill it as fast as she can.
As the Great Salt Lake shrinks, toxic dust from its exposed bed hangs in the Salt Lake Valley, and critical habitat for migratory birds continues to disappear. As water levels constantly teeter at record lows, Freeze has a big job. But to her it's a numbers game.
“We can stabilize the lake if we can get 250,000 acre-feet of water to the lake,” she said. “We can stabilize it from continuing to decline, and then any numbers beyond that help to bring it back up to a healthier level.”
Great Salt Lake sits at 4,190 feet as of early August — eight feet short of the minimum target range established in the 2024 strategic plan.
Freeze is looking to farmers for a hand as agriculture is Utah’s largest water user. But they’re already under pressure.
Drought, wildfires, rising input costs driven by the Iran war, an aging workforce and an administration that can shift a market with a social media post have left producers unsure how they’ll make ends meet. Asking them to give up water saved through conservation efforts is a tough sell.
Freeze understands this since her family runs an alfalfa farm (a crop that’s an oft-pointed-to boogeyman) in Box Elder County.
The answer, she believes, lies in a new policy signed by Gov. Spencer Cox this year. The law changes the way producers think about water, treating it less as a resource tied to the land and more as a tradable commodity.
Under the program, farmers can look to crop prices and long-range weather forecasts and decide not to use some of their allotted water. Instead, they can lease that water back to the state for the Great Salt Lake. Lawmakers put $2.75 million into the initiative.
Once a price for the water has been met, Freeze said she will work closely with irrigation companies who hold the water that’s allocated to the farmers. The state would then collect all the allocations it bought off the producers in one fell swoop and send it to the Great Salt Lake at the end of the season.
The new leasing program is promising to Valjay Rigby, a farmer from Cache Valley and president of the Utah Farm Bureau.
“It's a great opportunity for us because it's voluntary and it's temporary, it's compensated,” he said, adding that the initiative gives producers options on how they put food on the table.
The leasing would build off the existing Agricultural Water Optimisation Program, which incentivises ranchers to adopt proven farming techniques that prioritize water conservation.
According to the Department of Agriculture and Food, Utah has conserved approximately 130,000 acre-feet of water per year since 2019. But it was difficult for the state to track where the saved water actually went.
Sarah Null, a professor of watershed sciences at Utah State University, said the state worked hard to put conservation policies in place but acknowledged they weren't connected “with actually delivering water to the lake.”
“So I would say that's the really huge frontier that we need to grapple with next,” she said.
Null is also part of the Great Salt Lake Strike Team, a group of experts in public policy, hydrology, water management, climatology, and dust. She works closely with the Great Salt Lake Commission and Freeze.
The return of the Winter Olympics to Salt Lake City in 2034 has put more pressure on state leaders to get the lake back to healthy levels.
“It's coming down to the wire,” Null said.
The lake needs an additional 850,000 acre-feet of water each year to fill it in a couple of decades. She believes if they started doing that over the next eight years leading up to the Olympics, the lake “would start looking much better.”
Null and Freeze both made it clear that saving the Great Salt Lake does not rest solely on the farmers. They say responsibility falls on every Utahn who uses water – from cities and mineral companies to individual residents.
