Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes
This article is published through the Great Salt Lake Collaborative with funding from Love the Lake, an initiative of the non-profit Great Salt Lake Alliance. Editorial decisions are made independently by the Collaborative and partner newsrooms.
SALT LAKE CITY — With Utah in a drought, state leaders are asking everyone to conserve water. But when water is saved, where does it go?
The KSL Investigators found that the answer is complicated, especially regarding the state’s Agricultural Water Optimization Program and the Great Salt Lake.
The program helps farmers, ranchers and canal companies pay for upgrades meant to make agricultural water systems more efficient. Those projects can include converting flood irrigation to sprinkler systems, piping canals and installing technology to measure and manage water use.
According to the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food’s dashboard, the program shows more than $64 million in UDAF grant funding for completed projects and more than 125,000 acre-feet in reported water savings each year. That is more water than Salt Lake City uses annually.
But right now, state leaders and water experts said they cannot point to a specific amount of the reported agricultural water savings and say it reached the Great Salt Lake.
Paul Brooks, a professor at the University of Utah and a member of the Great Salt Lake Strike Team, said a key challenge is measurement.
“You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” Brooks said.
Brooks said the water system was not originally designed to move saved water to the lake. Instead, it was built to deliver water to farms, cities, reservoirs and other users.
“If we save water in one location, you can imagine there are 20 other potential uses of that water between where those savings occur and the lake,” Brooks said.
That could include another farm, a reservoir or a city downstream. Brooks said making sure saved water is “shepherded” all the way to the lake requires legal protections and enough measurement points to track it through canals and rivers.
“At first glance it seems like it should be so easy,” Brooks said. “Oh, you just don’t use the water and you just send it straight to the lake. Well, there isn’t a way to send it straight to the lake.”
Tony Richards, water optimization program manager for the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food, said the program measures diversion savings — the amount of water no longer diverted from a stream, river or other source to a farm. He said depletion, or the amount of water actually consumed through evaporation or plant use, is harder to calculate.
“So we know and have confidence in diversion savings,” Richards said. “We know we’re reducing the amount of water that we’re diverting from the original source.”
But Richards also said the program cannot currently track exactly where all of the saved water goes.
“When we’re measuring, the only way we’re able to measure is overall savings, but we have no way of seeing where the water goes because of what our technology limitations are,” Richards said.
The state’s 2025 Agricultural Water Optimization Program annual report says $200 million has been appropriated to the program. The report also says three saved water change applications had been filed with the Division of Water Rights as of October 2025 and were still being processed. The report found mixed results when looking at depletion changes in case studies, with some projects saving water and others showing increased depletion. It concluded no firm overall conclusion could be made yet.
Great Salt Lake Water Coordinator Micah Safsten said the optimization program is an important first step because it can help farmers install meters and technology that make future leasing possible.
But Safsten said reported diversion savings do not automatically mean the Great Salt Lake receives that water.
“Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t,” Safsten said.
He said the next step is leasing or dedicating water for the lake through the Great Salt Lake Preservation Program.
“What I will say is that ... 125,000 acre feet of diversion savings is still only like the first step to ever dedicating that water to the Great Salt Lake,” Safsten said. “The second step is then the state coming in and actually leasing it.”
Safsten said Utah’s water systems were built decades ago to get water to individual farms, not necessarily to the end of the system at the Great Salt Lake.
“Now we’re talking about getting water to the very end of the system at the end of the Great Salt Lake,” Safsten said.
Great Salt Lake Commissioner Brian Steed said the state has made progress in measuring and dedicating water to the lake, but more work remains. He said the state has put in more measuring systems over the past several years and needs more to track water from the point where it is conserved to where it is delivered.
“We know we’re not there yet, but we’re making big progress,” Steed said.
Steed said the concern is making sure water dedicated for the lake is not picked up by another water user downstream.
Steed said there are some gauges currently in Utah’s waterways, but not enough to track the water properly. He estimated startup costs could be around $30 million to provide the state with the equipment needed to monitor the movement of water, with additional money needed to maintain it. However, he emphasized that measurement is only one piece of a larger puzzle that all Utahns will need to address together.
For now, the KSL Investigators found the state can show reported agricultural diversion savings and millions of dollars invested in farm and canal upgrades. But it cannot yet say how much of the water reported as saved through the Agricultural Water Optimization Program is reaching the Great Salt Lake.
Have you experienced something you think just isn’t right? The KSL Investigators want to help. Submit your tip at investigates@ksl.com or 385-707-6153 so we can get working for you.
*This story was adapted from a TV broadcast script using artificial intelligence. Every s*tory, including those adapted with AI, is reviewed by a human editor before publication to ensure that KSL’s editorial standards are upheld.
