Matt Yost is USU Extension’s plants, soils, & climate associate department head and serves on the Great Salt Lake Strike Team, a group of researchers from Utah’s research universities and state agencies that provide information on the health of the lake and ways to save it.
At the People’s Great Salt Lake Summit in Sandy on July 15, Yost said the Strike Team estimated that to reach and maintain a healthy level, the lake would need to receive somewhere between 200,000 to 1 million acre-feet of water each year.
“Do we understand how much water that is? A lot, in case you wondered," Yost said.
The best estimate is that agriculture uses a little over 60% of the lake’s water, which would be about 1.2 to 1.3 million acre feet of water per year, about the same amount of water the lake needs to stay at a health level.
”That is the entire use of water in agriculture in the entire basin. Everything. Every foot of water used for agriculture. That’s devastating," Yost said.
Yost said Great Salt Lake and the agriculture industry each provide about $2 billion to Utah’s economy every year.
That’s why he said Utah needs to figure out how to get more water to the lake, while also sustaining the ag industry, which won’t be easy, but he said there are two good options.
The first is finding ways to recover the 10 to 15% of water that is lost due to evaporation or irrigation issues. Yost said by doing this, it’s estimated that 180,000 acre-feet of water could go back into the lake every year.
“And that I think is where we have to start," Yost said.
The next option would be to fallow some crops. While that’s not ideal, Yost said there are strategic ways to do that successfully.
He said if these two things don’t work, farmers will have to take more extreme measures, but for now it’s looking optimistic.
