Newcastle farmer Kimball Holt said Utah laws have historically encouraged water overuse on the state's farmlands, but a change in how water is allotted gave Holt and others a chance to branch out crop-wise while conserving.
The Holt Dairy Farm is located in Basin 71, and its water rights are managed under the State Engineer's Beryl Enterprise Groundwater Management Plan, which was adopted in December 2012. The plan's goals include limiting groundwater withdrawals to safe yield and protecting water quality and the aquifer's integrity.
Safe yield is the amount of groundwater that can be pumped sustainably, which was determined to be about 34,000 acre-feet per year in Basin 71. At the time the plan was written, the State Engineer's office estimated the average depletion to be approximately 65,000 acre-feet per year.
"Basically, we're going to lose 50% of our water over the next 100 years," Holt said during a bus tour of the farm for the Utah Hay and Forage Symposium. "And so we started working with the state saying, 'Hey, if we're going to lose our water, we need to have better tools to use water. I mean, the current laws incentivize overuse.'"
Holt said they needed the ability to be flexible and began working with the state on a water depletion and diversion analysis.
"We put meters on all of our wells to measure how much gallonage we were using, and then, over time, we found that we were using significantly less water on these other crops — on corn, on triticale. We said, 'Look, if you can give us more flexibility, we can be more profitable with less water.'"
The Holt Dairy Farm converted its water rights to commercial water, requiring them to measure each gallon out of every well, Holt said. Then, they agreed to reduce their water allotment from 48 inches of water per acre to 40 in exchange for increased flexibility.
The new system is called the Roswell Accounting Method, Holt said.
"It's a 10-year fixed time application where it's broken into two five-year buckets," he said. "And you're allowed to kind of change your water within those five years, meaning you can save and use it next year, or you can overuse one year and pull it from the next. It's kind of a five-year water averaging. … This is a program that's now available to all farmers in the state; it's, you know — the ground's been plowed per se."
Holt said this system allows the farm the flexibility to appropriately manage drought and wet years.
"When it's a drought is when you actually want to be using more water, because typically feed prices are higher when there's a drought, right? And so, it allows the farmer to just use his own economics instead of, 'You have to use this water. If you don't use it, it's gone for good,'" he said.
Additionally, Holt said the method allows them to spread the water over more acreage, with the farm increasing its total yield by double over 10 years while using less water.
"We decreased diversion, which is the amount of gallons pumped out of the ground, by 15%," he said, adding that they also decreased depletion, the amount of water that doesn't percolate back underground, by nearly 2%.
Holt said the farm began planting triticale between 10 and 15 years ago with the goal of saving water. And the new accounting system allowed him to replace more alfalfa fields with this grain.
"It's been planted by other people for years," he said. "It's not something we came up with. But the amount we use just went up and up and up as we got more experience. … As we have the capacity to plant more and more and more, we just planted more and more and more."
Holt said corn is also a water-efficient crop that other farmers could easily switch to. While triticale is planted in the fall and grown in the spring, corn is planted in the spring and doesn't require much water until monsoon season.
"And once the monsoon season comes, you don't have all that evaporation, and it goes to town, growing during the efficient times to grow," he said. "So you don't think of a summer crop being water efficient, but corn is actually quite water efficient."
When asked why more Utah farmers don't make the switch, Holt said it's because water laws have previously incentivized alfalfa.
"Why would you do 80% of the value (of alfalfa) and leave a bunch of the water in the ground when the law says you either use that water or you don't have the right to use it next year?" he said. "So that's one of the purposes of this more flexible accounting; it's going to allow people to do whatever is really most water-efficient."
Additionally, Holt said it's difficult to make a crop change since many have been farming alfalfa for generations and have purchased specialized equipment for the job.
"It takes a lot to switch equipment, to learn how to do corn, to learn how to do anything," he said. "And that's a pretty big risk. I mean, I can see the hesitancy of some people, but if it's the more efficient (crop) over time, it will be adopted, and especially as the water cuts happen."
Holt credited staff from the State Engineer's office for making the Roswell Accounting Method possible.
"They've been phenomenal, phenomenal people to work with," he said.
The Holt Dairy Farm's other sustainable practices include building a digester to capture methane from cow waste to generate electricity and using wood chips as bedding for many of their cattle rather than straw.
Holt said that wood chips have a higher carbon-to-nitrogen ratio than straw, and because it's comprised of small pieces, it's easier to clean.
"Then you just scoop it away and put it on the fields," he said. "And then you're increasing your organic matter on the fields every year."
