Carter Williams, KSL.com

Editor’s note: This article is part one of a two-part series on water conservation methods and the Great Salt Lake.

It is published through the Great Salt Lake Collaborative, a solutions journalism initiative that partners news, education and media organizations to help inform people about the plight of the Great Salt Lake.

LAYTON — A lot has changed since Preston Cox and his wife, Melissa, founded Perennial Favorites in the early ’90s, growing about 4,000 plants and 25 varieties from a wholesale nursery in the backyard of their home near the Great Salt Lake wetlands.

“We started the business, and just gradually, each year, we’d add onto the business,” he said, standing on a narrow dirt road employees in motorized carts use to reach the seemingly endless rows of plants and greenhouses.

It’s a full-scale operation, three decades later, with dozens of employees who tend a portion of the 1.2 million plants of about 1,500 or more varieties that the company now grows annually. On a warm and partly cloudy August afternoon, they were hard at work, getting the plants ready for the many clients the company has amassed all over the region and beyond with help from the internet.

Carter Williams, KSL.com

That’s not the only change, though. Cox has seen the county’s population double, and there’s now a highway that juts through the farmland just south of the nursery. However, he figures the biggest difference might be how much he and his colleagues dwell on water availability.

Water wasn’t an issue three decades ago, he says. The Great Salt Lake was close to its historic average, having just receded from its record high. Utah had its droughts, but it wasn’t something that threatened the Great Salt Lake basin’s water supply either.

Now, water is one of the primary topics his business and many others in the agricultural community talk about following several major drought cycles and the decline of the Great Salt Lake.

“(We realized) here not too long ago … that something had to change,” he said.

A slowdown in Utah’s water paradigm shift?

Cox isn’t alone in this feeling. Water users across several industries within the Great Salt Lake basin and across the state have rethought the way they consume water. Most of it started as drought became a reoccurring theme almost every year, beginning around 2000.

Carter Williams, KSL.com

The desire to conserve increased from mid-2020 to early 2023 as Utah went through one of its worst drought cycles on record. It was part of a two-decadeslong “megadrought” across the West, which researchers determined to be the worst in 1,200 years.

Water managers reported all kinds of water consumption cuts during that time. The state pushed water conservation measures as its reservoir system fell to about 40% capacity statewide.

However, this year has felt slightly different. Water consumption, as of early September, rose about 5% above the three-year average within the Salt Lake Department of Public Utilities service area, said director Laura Briefer.

Her department handles water needs in Salt Lake City, Cottonwood Heights, Holladay, Millcreek and some unincorporated parts of Salt Lake County. Representatives of the Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District and Weber Basin Water Conservancy District — two other major water managers within the basin — say they also noticed small increases in water consumption this past summer.

Alan Packard, assistant general manager for the Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District, said it could be weather-induced. June, July and August combined to produce Utah’s second-hottest meteorological summer since 1895. While rainfall was close to normal statewide, some counties within the Great Salt Lake basin dealt with the largest precipitation deficits.

Carter Williams, KSL.com

“It was a bit hotter and drier this summer as compared to last summer. Our demands have increased,” he said.

Briefer agrees that it could be tied to summer conditions because people appeared to slow down consumption when it rained. It could also be the aftereffect of back-to-back strong snowpack collections.

That major multiyear drought Utah experienced quickly vanished after a record-breaking snowpack changed Utah’s water fortunes in early 2023. A second above-normal collection this past winter — plus some additional monsoon moisture — briefly lifted any moderate drought status in Utah this year for the first time since 2019.

With Utah’s reservoir system reaching its highest point in 13 years, it’s possible that residents loosened up because water scarcity was no longer as visible as it was during the last drought.

“It just feels like maybe there’s a little fatigue around water issues and drought because we’ve had such an intense last couple of years where that was a tremendous focus,” Briefer said.

Cox noticed another change in consumer habits. Perennial Favorites shifted the types of plants it grew so Utahns could plant more water-efficient gardens. This started about 15 years ago when it became difficult to keep up with more dry years than not.

The company moved away from growing “water-hogging” plants, like astilbes and ligularia, and focused more on producing higher volumes of native and “water-friendly” alternatives like echinaceas, rudbeckias and penstemons.

He says customers were initially wary about the business decision, but that softened with every drought. The more Utah residents understood the impact of outdoor watering on the state’s water supply, the more they became interested in native plants.

But business has slowed down some after back-to-back productive winters.

“We’ve seen that interest drop off a little bit,” he said. “I think that’s a bad thing because we’re in Utah. If we have a couple of wet years, it’s not too far down the road that we’ll be back in some dry years.”

Still clinging to conservation

This is why the company has no plans to back down from water conservation. Perennial Favorites offered reporters a tour of its premises in August to showcase a water reclamation system concocted by Cox’s son, Cort, a few years ago.

During our visit, Cort Cox swung open a door to a small shed and pointed to the various control panels that help the company save and reuse water stored. It’s a fairly complex system, but it essentially takes extra water from time watering plants and stores it in three large black containers so it can be reused in the watering process in certain sections of the nursery.

The idea, Cort Cox said, came together after the company noticed excess water pooling up after each watering period. The system helps the company save about 15,000 gallons of water every day, including about 1 million to 1.2 million gallons (3-3.7 acre-feet) of water during the primary growing season.

“I feel like that’s really big for us and for our community,” he said.

The project cost about $50,000 for the company to install, but Cort Cox said he believes it was worth it because it opens up a little more water to go to areas in need and helps them save water as it has become more uncertain.

Water conservation wasn’t always what people in the farming, ranching and growing community talked about, but drought has changed that, says Joel Ferry, who serves as director of the Utah Department of Natural Resources and is a fifth-generation farmer and rancher in Box Elder County.

Agricultural water — adding in some golf courses — has historically accounted for about 84% of the state’s water consumption since 1950, Utah State University researchers wrote in a report last year. The industry remains the biggest water consumer, but the percentage used dropped to about 80% in 2015.

Utah’s Coordinated Action Plan for Water, released in 2022, estimated that agriculture remains the state’s biggest water user, but its share has since slipped to about 75%.

Ferry’s farm underwent a major transformation fairly early in the megadrought. He said he installed “miles and miles” of irrigation piping to replace the old, uncovered dirt ditches. It eliminated evaporation, seepage loss and other issues that led to water loss before it could be used on any plants.

He also started laser-leveling the land so that water was evenly distributed throughout the field and began planting cover crops that can reduce evaporation and the need for watering in drought years.

“(We use) a whole myriad of different practices that all add up to make a big difference,” he said, standing by a small stream on the farm that feeds into the Bear River about 50 yards away. “If I can eliminate one irrigation cycle on my corn, that’s going to save hundreds of acre-feet of water.”

The state followed suit, creating an agriculture water optimization program in 2019 to help facilitate these types of changes. The goal is that every farm, ranch and grower has the potential to save a large amount of water.

Neither Ferry nor Perennial Favorites participated in this program for their projects, but other agricultural water consumers quickly jumped at the opportunity. Businesses in Box Elder, Cache, Davis and Rich counties — all within the lake basin — account for most projects approved thus far.

Some other industries are also changing water practices specifically because of the Great Salt Lake’s decline in recent decades. Compass Minerals reached a deal with Utah earlier this month to permanently direct over 200,000 acre-feet of water to the lake every year, following a mineral-related bill passed this year.

Municipalities haven’t stopped, either. Despite this summer’s water use uptick, Briefer points out that municipal water consumption this summer is still nowhere near the historic levels before drought left the state’s future water supply in doubt.

That, she says, gives her hope that Utahns are aware of the risk the state regularly faces, because its water fortunes can quickly change again. She adds that the Great Salt Lake is also far from making a full recovery from years of drought and overconsumption, which is still a major concern for many communities near it.

Packard feels the same way. He said using less water can help Utah survive long droughts and help struggling bodies of water like the Great Salt Lake.

He spoke about conservation habits earlier this month after an event celebrating the release of 10,000 acre-feet of water from Utah Lake to the Great Salt Lake. More than half of the number came from tallying up all the water conserved by residents within the Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District last year.

“We want to continue to emphasize to the public it is to use water wisely,” he said. “If we have the combined efforts of all of our water users in our service area, it’ll make us confident to make these sorts of releases in the future.”