Gov. Spencer Cox recently stepped up on his Twitter soapbox to boast about his office’s efforts to help save the diminishing Great Salt Lake and conserve water in Utah. His attempts to instill confidence have actually only inspired more worry.
He bragged that he appointed Rep. Joel Ferry to oversee our state’s water resources. Rep. Ferry is a rancher legislator who, in the most recent legislative session, pushed HB476, a bill to totally deregulate animal agriculture, one of the largest consumers of water.
Cox also stated that the Legislature had passed a water optimization grant that will save an estimated 65,000 acre-feet of water per year. We were supposed to be impressed with this figure, but the state’s agriculture sector uses more than 4.2 million acre-feet of water each year. This means that this grant only represents a savings of 1.5%.
We won’t see the Great Salt Lake rebound with these meager half measures.
The reality is that we cannot continue to grow unlimited alfalfa and promote the interests of animal agriculture in our incredibly dry state if we want to save our precious water resources. The three rivers that feed the Great Salt Lake are all heavily diverted in order to irrigate alfalfa crops. I have little hope that our alfalfa farmer-in-chief will make the hard but necessary decisions to curb the wasteful activities of agriculture and save our shared environment.
Jeremy Beckham, Salt Lake City
