Every few minutes during a farm tour, Rhonda Gotway Clyde kneels down to sink her hands into the dirt.
She claws down a few inches, revealing the moist brown loam underneath neat rows of mulch. It’s soil Gotway Clyde has worked for decades to build out of the “blow sand” that otherwise dominates the Moab landscape.
The presence of earthworms is how you know the soil is healthy, she said.
“In the summer it feels like it’s crawling,” said Gotway Clyde, turning over clumps of soil. “You can feel the life in it.”
Gotway Clyde is the owner and manager of Easy Bee Farms, a small two-acre operation in Spanish Valley that produces farm-to-table vegetables, herbs and flowers.
In tourism-dominated Moab, agriculture isn’t nearly the biggest industry, nor the most prominent land use. But it’s an integral part of town history, the way Euro-Americans built lives along the Colorado River long before anyone named Charlie Steen appeared. In fact, there are nearly 1,100 shares in the Moab Irrigation Company, and they date back to 1890 or 1903. Each share represented a family that was irrigating at the time.
And agriculture lives on in Grand County. In 2022, county farmers produced crops, livestock and poultry worth $5.8 million, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
While some farmers have noted a massive decline in local agriculture as fertile land is increasingly gobbled up for development and housing, some note that the market is blossoming for certain niches, such as farm-to-table produce.
“I do see a strong interest in the younger generation, which is great,” said Gotway Clyde.
A changing landscape
Still, the new interest comes after a long decline in Moab Valley agriculture.
Gary Wilson has been growing alfalfa in Moab for 40 years. At its peak, his farm constituted 120 acres, much of it leased. Now, it’s half that.
Over his time, Wilson said he’s seen what used to be a dozen large farms shrink to three. Local agriculture, he said, has “diminished immensely.”
“It’s going away and it’s not going to come back,” he said.
Wilson chalked it up to increasing development pressure and skyrocketing land prices. He said land near his farm was recently quoted at $280,000 per acre.
“You can’t even consider farming property that costs that much money,” he said.
That’s something Gotway Clyde has observed, too. She said she was only able to start Easy Bee in 2015 by subdividing a five-acre parcel she and a friend bought a decade beforehand.
“We don’t have big ag here anymore,” she said. “It’s done.”
The loss of agricultural land is increasingly common throughout the state, according to Kelly Pehrson, the deputy commissioner of the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food.
“The last crop that goes on ag land is houses,” he quipped during a Grand County Commission meeting last May.
In some cases, however, a more intimate farming community can also benefit growers. Fred Facemire is the manager of Castle Valley Farms, a roughly 200-acre operation that was founded in 1970 alongside Castle Valley Academy, a Seventh-Day Adventist boarding school.
Facemire said Castle Valley’s relative lack of farmsenables his operation to produce a variety of crops, including a smorgasbord of fruits, vegetables, herbs and hays, as well as 14 separate varieties of potato. It also helps insulate the farm from external threats.
“The disease pressure is much less than it is in some other areas, where you get a disease in one farm and it’s transmitted by insects,” Facemire said. “…We thankfully don’t have that kind of pressure right here just because we don’t have a large number of growers growing the same types of products in a fairly small area.”
The straight dirt on water
Agriculture across the West has received intense scrutiny for the amount of water it consumes. For example, 52% of Colorado River water from 2000 to 2019 was funneled into agriculture, according to a March article published in the journal Nature. More than half that water was used for livestock feed, such as alfalfa.
“The problem is, everybody wants to eat,” Wilson quipped. He noted that without livestock, people would lose their coveted hamburgers, milk and cheese.
Wilson acknowledged that alfalfa does guzzle lots of water — each of his acres uses about 5.2 acre-feet annually — but said it’s also a high-yield, high-protein crop that produces a large return per drop of water used.
Indeed, market dynamics play a large part in driving the prominence of alfalfa. Wilson said the market for other hay crops “is pretty much nonexistent.”
“It’s not because people are unintelligent,” said Burdette Barker, an irrigation specialist with Utah State University Extension, of alfalfa growers. He noted that much of Utah’s prime farmland has been converted into homes, leaving farmers with less-productive land.
Market dynamics can also serve as a potent tool for conservation, Wilson said. For example, the relatively high cost of Moab Valley water is a direct incentive for farmers to use it efficiently.
“The incentive is, you used exactly what you need,” he said.
Still, Wilson said he thinks there’s room for improvement. For example, he said more irrigation water could be metered so farmers know exactly what they’re using. Installing soil moisture monitors can also help growers and researchers understand the efficiency of different irrigation techniques.
Both Castle Valley Farms and Easy Bee Farm also grow some alfalfa though their main focus is farm-to-table produce, vegetables and herbs.
Thom Mayer, a baker and former farm manager at Castle Valley Farms, said the farm employs a combination of methods, from pivot irrigation to drip-tape irrigation, to water crops. They recently bought a PVC irrigation pipe that enables greater precision in watering, Mayer said.
“We’re trying new things, looking at new things, what crops can we put in to save water,” Mayer said.
Gotway Clyde now grows just a row or two of alfalfa, though she started with 1.5 acres because the plant builds healthy, microorganism-heavy soil out of blow sand.
She uses drip irrigation and “all sorts of water conservation techniques,” and said she wishes people would recognize watering for food as a legitimate and important use.
“There is water in this valley,” Gotway Clyde said. “[The question] is, what do we use it for?”
Indeed, some research on the Moab Valley watershed has suggested that Moab and Spanish Valley could safely withdraw between 50% and 100% more water from underlying aquifers, per 2021 estimates from the Utah Division of Water Rights. Some, however, contend that Moab’s hydrology is still poorly understood and requires more research.
‘We want people to be healthy’
Several local producers said they’ve been heartened by an increasing emphasis on food resilience and food security, two concepts that prize access to local, sustainable agriculture.
“There are people recognizing the need for food security and real nutrition,” Facemire said. “That’s something that we have really taken on board to help provide here in our local community.”
Castle Valley Farms doesn’t use chemical fertilizers, and Facemire said he can see the difference in the food they harvest.
“We want people to be healthy, and being healthy starts with what you eat,” he said.
Gotway Clyde agreed that there’s growing passion for local, organic food.
“Because we’re so far from the hubs, it only makes sense agriculture is important to the community,” she said.
Both Easy Bee Farm and Castle Valley Farms sell their goods locally, at their own farmstands and at Moonflower Market. Easy Bee also sells to Moab restaurants and directly to residents through community-supported agriculture shares. (Wilson said his alfalfa mostly feeds local horses, though it nourishes some Navajo Nation sheep, too.)
(Courtesy photo) Lavender is one crop grown on the roughly 200-acre Castle Valley Farms.
Several nonprofits including the Resiliency Hub, the Youth Garden Project and Our Village Community Center also actively support small-scale local agriculture. All three have also been involved in Moab Community Gardens, which provides centralized garden plots for residents.
Still, there’s room for improvement, Gotway Clyde said. She said she’d like to see more support for agriculture from local government and more “microfarms” across the valley.
“I would actually welcome some competition,” she said.
Facemire and Mayer also emphasized the practical and spiritual benefits of farm work. Students at Castle Valley Academy all work on the farm, and Facemire said it’s a central part of the school’s philosophy.
“It’s important to have a balanced education that not only emphasizes the academics,” Facemire said. “… We also believe it’s important for them to learn agriculture, to learn how to grow and provide for their own food and for others as well.”
Many students from the school go on to serve as missionaries across the globe, so learning how to grow and prepare food can help students better serve other people, too, Facemire said.
Both he and Gotway Clyde also shared the joy that comes from feeding one’s neighbors and growing something straight out of the dirt.
“It’s just a tremendous blessing when we harvest whatever it is,” Facemire said, “and to be able to share that in the community is really something that’s very satisfying.”
This story was first published by The Times-Independent.