GUNNISON, Utah — After a hot and dry summer, and less than normal snowpack this past winter in the central and southern parts of the state, a number of Utah communities are now starting to run out of their irrigation water.
"Our reservoirs have gone empty. The flow started slowing down quite a bit 2-3 weeks ago, but they’re empty now," said Zach Jensen, who farms 4,500 acres of fields located throughout the South Sanpete and Sevier valleys. "We’re just running off of river flows but there’s not very much because the springs are drying up again with the drought."
Jensen, who comes from a long line of farmers, is also the president of the Gunnison Irrigation Company. He said his M & K Farms in Centerfield had to make some choices as far as which crops they'd plant this year due to the lack of water.
"We really wanted to do corn, because hay isn’t worth a lot these last couple years, so we really wanted to do corn, so we planted a shorter day corn knowing the water would run out in August," he explained.
It's not just central Utah farmers seeing the impact of the drought.
"We’re seeing impacts all across the state," said Jim Bowcutt, Utah Department of Agriculture and Food. "Obviously, at the beginning of the year, with the decreased snowpacks, you saw a lot of the producers down in southern and central Utah that were impacted. They were covered by the governor’s drought declaration."
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Bowcutt said he doesn't believe people realize the impact of going almost two months without rain up in northern Utah, and the impact it can have on a lot of the crop yields.
"So we are seeing a lot of the producers being heavily impacted," he shared.
Bowcutt advises local farmers to reach out to their agency to seek help as they offer a number of different resources.
"Whether they be from Emergency Disaster Relief Loans that help producers who might be impacted by the amount of feed being gone," explained Bowcutt. "They’re going to have to purchase feed from elsewhere to be able to supplement, and we have low-interest loans to help with that and we have a water optimization plan as well."
The loans were started in 2019 as a way to help farmers weather the drought conditions in the state and do so with more ag-resiliency.
"When it’s gone, it’s gone," said Jensen. "You can’t magically just turn on some other tap to get water. And then, as a business, you have to make those hard decisions of what’s worth doing and what’s not worth doing.
"You try your best and that’s all you really can do."
