From Deseret News archives:
Dry farmers in desperate trouble
"If we have another year like this year, most everybody's (loan) notes will come due and the farmers will not have enough money to pay them," says 83-year-old Deloris Stokes, seated behind the wheel of a combine two miles south of the Idaho border.
"I don't know if we can make it another year, if we have the same kind of year," says 28-year-old Allen Barry, who works a dry farm east of Monticello, San Juan County, 40 miles north of the Arizona border.
Dry farming, growing crops without irrigation, was common throughout Utah in decades past. Today, with reservoirs supplying water for most farms, the practice has dwindled.
Still, dry farming continues. The crop most often grown with the technique is wheat, but some barley and hay are grown on non-irrigated fields. Many dry farmers have some fields that are irrigated and some not. But others depend almost entirely on dry farming.
DelRoy Gneiting, who keeps tracks of agricultural statistics for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Salt Lake City, said last year Utahns planted about 107,500 acres of wheat on non-irrigated land.
"The irrigated yields a lot more," he said.
For perspective, he noted that wheat on irrigated land amounted to 38,500 acres last year, 26 percent of the total acreage planted with that grain. But 69 percent of Utah's wheat came from irrigated land.
"There's no question the yields are less this year," Gneiting said.
Martha Franks, Tremonton, Box Elder County, secretary for the Northern Utah Organic Group, says some dry farmers in the group were in trouble from the beginning of the year. In some areas, crops have failed.
"There wasn't any moisture to drill into" when dry farmers were planting, Franks added. "There was no moisture to germinate the seed."
Jim Keyes, Utah State University extension agent in San Juan County, said at least 70 percent of the wheat crop is gone in southeastern Utah.
"There's absolutely no beans this year," he said. "Any beans that were planted just came up maybe an inch or two, and that's it."
Barry, the young farmer working east of Monticello, said the drought is the worst he and his father can remember. The impact is "terrible" on their dry farm of around 5,000 aces.
On an average year the farm yields 20 to 25 bushels for every acre planted. "I think we averaged about 6 this year on our wheat. Our corn — we may not even be able to harvest it."
