Washington, DC, September 19, 2023 --  

The Great Salt Lake is shrinking again after a year of record rainfall. This won't end well.

Headlines about America's dried-up inland seas are currently dominated by the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Despite near-record inflows from melted winter snowpack earlier this year, the northern arm of the Great Salt Lake remains just a half foot above its lowest level ever¹. The northern arm was cut off from the larger and river-fed southern part of the lake by a railroad causeway and berm built in the 1950. While the berm was not intended to help save the southern part of the lake, that has happened by accident. It is reminiscent of an embarrassing berm that today protects the former Soviet Union's rump North Aral Sea.

Despite the above average rain and snowfalls that helped recharge the lake in the spring, levels are once again shrinking. While this is normal for late summer and fall, it falls on the heels of a 20-year drought for the western United States that serves as a wakeup call over unsustainable water use. Just as in the Soviet Union, America's agriculture is the chief villain.

About 86 percent of the water use in the American West goes to agriculture.² Just as the communists planted thirsty cotton in the desert regions of the Soviet Union, California and Utah farmers engage in similarly irresponsible practices. Alfalfa crops used for cattle feed soak up huge volumes of scarce water, then many of the cattle who feed on it are exported to China and Japan.³

You'd think such brain-dead economics would be limited to Soviet commissars, but given the low water prices guaranteed to American farmers, they have little incentive to use water wisely. In many areas of California's Central Valley, farmers on land tracing their water rights to the early settlers are allowed to buy huge volumes of water at around $20 per acre-foot -- enough to fill half of an Olympic-sized swimming pool. The more acres they have, the more they can buy at this price. Meanwhile, urban residents pay 20-40 times as much.⁴ If farmers don't use all the water allotted to them at this crazy low price, they lose it. Next thing you know they are growing alfalfa in the desert.

And California is not alone in this craziness. Utah farmers use irrigation water to grow alfalfa, too. So much so that the lake is drying up and the city faces a future of toxic dust storms from corrosive salt and dried pollutants on the exposed lakebed.

If Utah residents want to know where this will lead, they don't have to look at the former Soviet Union, they can simply look at the nearby Salton Sea in southwestern California. There, a shrinking and increasingly saline pool is ringed by decrepit resort towns from the 1950s, incrasingly far from shore. The former marinas are all dried up -- just like those in former-Soviet Moynaq. And the remaining residents are increasingly poor agricultural workers and their families who face heightened risk of asthma, lung cancer and other diseases from the toxic dust. A higher rate of capture of irrigation water by farmers means that runoff feeding the Salton Sea is not enough to sustain the water level. Things will only get worse as time goes on.

This is the grim future faced by residents of Salt Lake City. And it is true regardless of whether there is less rain and snowfall in the future due to climate change. Even if rainfall sticks to historic averages, Utah farmers use up so much water before it reaches the lake that the inland sea is doomed to continue shrinking. The only thing that can change that is a reform of property rights over water.

Back in the 19th century when water rights were codified, it was inconceivable that farmers would stop so much water from flowing downstream that the Great Salt Lake would dry up. But given that real risk, it's time to start hitting the problem head on. To the extent that the value of letting water flow to the Great Salt Lake is greater than its value to farmers for growing alfalfa, then state governments must put their money where their mouth is and buy out farmers' water rights.⁵ The tyranny and abuse of Western farmers over water must be brought to an end.

Notes:

1. KSL, Why is this Section of the Great Salt Lake Still Close to its Record Low? September 18, 2023

2. Vox, Who’s really using up the water in the American West? September 26, 2022

3. Ibid.

4. Natural Resources Defense Council, How California’s Water Rights System Gouges You and Me, February 6, 2023

5. Salt Lake Tribune, Why it’s Time for Utah to Buy out Alfalfa Farmers and Let the Water Flow, December 5, 2022