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The Great Salt Lake is grabbing national attention as it hovers barely a foot above its record low.

Renewed chatter about the lake seems to dredge up old myths and misunderstandings we’ve spent years trying to debunk, some of which have resurfaced in recent weeks. Let’s go over some of them.

Is Utah exporting most its water overseas via alfalfa?

This myth bubbles up year after year. Agriculture uses about 65% of the water that would otherwise flow to the Great Salt Lake, according to the latest Great Salt Lake Strike Team report. Much of the agricultural land in the Great Salt Lake Basin is used to grow alfalfa.

So where is all that alfalfa going? According to researchers with Utah State University, only about 9% of our alfalfa hay was exported to other countries in 2022, the most recent year for which USU had data, although as much as 22% of the state’s alfalfa was exported in 2019. China is the biggest buyer.

That means most of that hay stays here, feeding the cows that become the beef and dairy products Utahns and other Americans like to eat.

Rumors have also cropped up at times that farmland across the state are owned by Saudis or other foreign interests. This likely stems from reporting in 2023 and earlier that found a Saudi Arabia-based company was pumping vast amounts of groundwater in Arizona to grow alfalfa for export. But there’s no evidence that’s happening in Utah.

The Utah Department of Agriculture and Food pointed me to a 2024 USDA foreign holdings report, which shows less than 1% of the agricultural land in Utah is owned by foreign entities.

Saudis could be leasing farmland in Utah and flying under the radar, but even in Arizona, foreign exports of hay are small.

“I get it, it’s attractive to find a ‘villain’ when faced with hard situations,” said Emily Lewis, a water attorney at Culp and Kelly who has helped craft water policy in Utah for 15 years. “But the reality is the Great Salt Lake is a shared problem we are all responsible for solving.”

Do Utah politicians care about saving the lake?

For about a century, water law was seen as sacrosanct in the West. Trying to change it meant lawmakers put their political careers on the line. In Utah, that changed in 2021 when the Legislature recognized the lake was on the verge of collapse.

The state overhauled concepts like “use it or lose it” to allow water right holders to keep their water in-stream to benefit the environment. They created a water leasing program. They doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to improve conservation and repair the lake’s ecosystem.

Those programs take time.

“We are still figuring out how to implement it on the ground,” Lewis said. “Most people in this space understand it’s a problem, and if there were an easy solution, we already would have implemented it.”

Farmers and large water rights holders need to trust that the new system will work, though, and many feel like their way of life is under attack. Meanwhile, lawmakers and state agencies support seemingly contradictory projects like massive data centers and inland port industrial developments near the lake’s shore.

Does Utah want to dam the lake’s largest tributary?

In 1991 Utah lawmakers passed the Bear River Development Act, which directs the Division of Water Resources to dam and store 220,000 acre-feet from the Bear River, the largest river that feeds the Great Salt Lake.

It caused a stir in 2016 when a group of researchers published a white paper that calculated the project would drop the Great Salt Lake by 8.5 inches, exposing another 30 square miles of lakebed. The lake was already in rough shape, and lowering its naturally shallow water by such a dramatic amount alarmed environmental groups.

Folks new to Utah probably haven’t heard of it, though, because it’s essentially dead in the water. When the Legislature passed the act in the ‘90s, they thought the dams and reservoirs would be in place by 2015.

Now, the state estimates it won’t need the Bear River development until 2050 or beyond, if ever.

The division’s Bear River Development manager, Marisa Egbert, spends most of her time administering grant money for secondary metering — one of the biggest and most expensive programs lawmakers adopted to curb municipal water use.

“They are pouring millions of dollars into other ways and means to find water for a growing population,” Egbert said.

That doesn’t mean the state has completely abandoned its Bear River Development plans – that would take another act from the Legislature. But these days, the division is mostly buying up rights-of-ways for an eventual pipeline in case the dams and reservoirs ever get built. It’s cheaper to buy that land now while it’s still farms and not subdivisions. Lawmakers have yet to appropriate a dime for a single dam, Egbert said.

State of the lake

What’s not surprising to me is that there seems to be renewed interest in the Great Salt Lake’s fate. And our winter of no snow followed by an intensely hot spring and summer continues to take a toll. All those recent rainstorms did little to reverse the lake’s trend of decline.

We officially edged out 2021 for second place this year. The lake is currently at 4,189.7 feet in the south arm and 4,189.4 feet in the saltier north arm.

This article is published through the Great Salt Lake Collaborative with funding from Love the Lake, an initiative of the nonprofit Great Salt Lake Alliance. Editorial decisions are made independently by the collaborative and partner newsrooms.