How much water are Utah's agriculture optimization projects saving?
Close to 250 of the approved projects within the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food's Agricultural Water Optimization Program are now complete and, combined, they've saved 40,891 acre-feet of water annually, according to numbers reported to the state last week.
That's enough water to fill up a reservoir the size of Quail Creek Reservoir in Washington County every year.
The number is based on one full year of irrigation following a project's completion, Tony Richards, the program's manager, told members of the Utah Legislature's Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environmental Quality Appropriations Subcommittee last week. It will rise as more projects go online in the coming years.
On-farm enhancements account for nearly 80% of the approved projects, while the rest involve improvements to canal systems, according to department data presented to the subcommittee. About $56.7 million has been distributed to farmers and ranchers since 2019 through the $150.6 million obligated to the program so far, Richards added.
The department selected projects based on different criteria, such as project type, projected water saved and cost per acre. The state also selects 'priority water' areas on a changing basis, depending on Utah's needs, he explained. He said the program has also evolved to handle other water solutions, such as exploring alternative crops that may not need as much water.
'We do understand there's an efficiency improvement (need) in the infrastructure side of it, but there's also efficiency that we could gain in looking at management,' he told the committee. 'That even includes no-till (and) cover crops — all those kinds of things we can do to try and squeeze every drop out that we can.'
The program has been in high demand since it began in 2019, drawing in 1,577 applications to date.
Agricultural water has historically been the top water consumer in the state, accounting for 75% to 85% of Utah's water use. The program was created as the state experienced more frequent droughts, causing water uncertainty within the industry.
However, the state wasn't always so certain about the success of the program. The program has required water meters since 2019, but lawmakers said they wanted more proof of water savings being allocating more funds, as the data wasn't always clear.
The state approved a measure that allows farmers and ranchers to sell their reduced water for conservation purposes without losing their water rights, helping out struggling bodies of water like the Great Salt Lake. The department is close to launching a new online dashboard that will provide updated information as more projects are completed and provide at least a year's worth of data, as well, Richards said.
Utah's Agricultural Water Optimization Committee recommended that the program dedicate at least $1 million in future spending toward research. That research will include ways to figure out the best irrigation techniques that help farmers and ranchers remain productive without consuming as much water as they previously did, he added.
'We want to be able to flex where we can and make the choices and best improvements that don't have the negative impacts,' he said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Washington Post
28 minutes ago
- Washington Post
What does Trump's tax law mean for your health insurance?
RFK Jr. has big plans for your food. Here are the facts. May 2, 2025
Yahoo
29 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Opinion: How the Trump tax cut law will hurt the working class
Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said it was 'agonizing' to vote for the tax cut bill President Trump signed on July 4. As details of the legislation come into focus, it's obvious why it might cause heartburn even for Republicans who passed it, with no Democratic votes. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, as the law is clumsily known, will literally make the rich better off and the poor worse off. Some conservatives who want to pare the 'welfare state' may not care. But imposing austerity on millions of working-class voters is a stunning political risk for a party that is supposedly following President Trump's populist instincts. The law has two main elements. The first is a sweeping series of tax cuts and tax cut extensions that will generally benefit everybody but add trillions of dollars to the national debt. The second is a set of benefit cuts that are meant to reduce the overall cost of the bill. Those will hit working-class Americans and make the net effect of the bill punishing to them. The biggest part of the OBBBA is an extension of the tax cuts Trump signed into law in 2017. Those were due to expire at the end of this year. The OBBBA makes the current individual income tax rates permanent. Those are not 'tax cuts' per se, since tax rates will be the same in future years as they are in 2025. But the law does prevent what would have been a de facto tax hike if the 2017 rates expired and the higher 2016 rates went back into effect. The law also includes some new tax breaks, such as the elimination of tax on income from tips and overtime pay, up to certain limits. There's also a new tax break for some seniors and a much higher cap for deducting state and local taxes, which will mostly benefit wealthy homeowners who itemize deductions on their tax returns. The tax provisions generally benefit everybody, but the wealthy will gain the most. The average savings for all taxpayers will be about $2,900, compared with what the tax bill would have been if current rates expired, according to the Tax Policy Center. Those with incomes above $1 million would save nearly $60,000 on average. But the savings for workers with incomes below $30,000 would be less than $200 per year. Those provisions, at least, do no harm to most taxpayers. But the harm arrives when factoring in cuts to Medicaid, subsidies for people to buy health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, and food aid known as SNAP. The healthcare cutbacks will leave an additional 16 million people without coverage by 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Cutbacks to the SNAP program could reduce or eliminate food aid going to 22 million families, according to the Urban Institute. Those changes will leave millions of Americans worse off. When accounting for the tax changes and benefit cuts combined, people in the lowest income quintile, with incomes below $13,500, will lose an average of $600 per year, according to the Yale Budget Lab. The next quintile will lose $65 per year. The healthcare and food aid cuts will have little impact on top earners, for obvious reasons. The top quintile will gain $6,500 in after-tax savings from all of the law's provisions, while the top 1% will net more than $30,000. This is what economists call a 'regressive' policy change because the economic burden falls more heavily on those with lower incomes. 'The bill has four overriding characteristics,' Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center wrote recently. 'It is regressive, expensive, complicated, and it treats people who make roughly the same amount of money in very different ways.'Tax cut defenders often point out that the wealthy typically get the biggest tax cuts because they pay the most taxes in the first place. That's generally true. But the wealthy are a distinct minority, which means a regressive law such as the OBBBA dis-serves millions of voters, and possibly a majority of them. The bottom two income quintiles, for instance, include roughly 92 million taxpaying units, whether singles, married couples, or other designations. There are only 26 million taxpaying units in the top quintile. Maybe that's what Murkowski found so agonizing. 'Do I like this bill? No,' she told a reporter on July 2. 'I know in many parts of the country there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill.' Trump can point to working-class provisions such as the elimination of taxes on tip income and overtime pay, with limitations based on the type of work and the amount of income. Some workers will in fact benefit from those carve-outs. But tax analysts argue that favoring certain types of work in that manner violates the principle of 'horizontal equity,' the idea that similar incomes should be taxed in similar ways. To use the example of a restaurant, a waiter earning tip income would get a tax break that a cook paid hourly would not. That distorts the tax code, creates incentives to cheat, and generates legitimate grievances among the unlucky workers not gifted a tax break. The OBBBA is already unpopular, with 64% of Americans disapproving and just 35% approving, in one poll. The real vote will come in the 2026 midterm elections, when Americans will express whether they feel better off or worse off under unified Republican control of government. Getting Americans to like this law might be a more agonizing ideal than passing it. Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Bluesky and X: @rickjnewman. Click here for political news related to business and money policies that will shape tomorrow's stock prices.
Yahoo
38 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Elon Musk's xAI apologizes for Grok chatbot's antisemitic responses
Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot feature issued an apology after it made several antisemitic posts on the social media site X this week. In a statement posted to X on July 12, xAI, the artificial intelligence company that makes the chatbot program, apologized for "horrific behavior" on the platform. Users reported receiving responses that praised Hitler, used antisemitic phrases and attacked users with traditionally Jewish surnames. More: Grok coming to Tesla vehicles 'next week at the latest,' Musk says "We deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced," the company's statement said. "Our intent for @grok is to provide helpful and truthful responses to users. After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot." The company, founded by Musk in 2023 as a challenger to Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Alphabet's Google, said the update to the program resulted in a deviation in the AI chatbot's behavior. It was operational for 16 hours before it was removed as a result of the reported extremist language. Users on X shared multiple posts July 8 in which Grok repeated antisemitic stereotypes about Jewish people, among various other antisemitic comments. It's not the first time xAI's chatbot has raised alarm for its responses. In May, the chatbot mentioned "white genocide" in South Africa in unrelated conversations. At the time, xAI said the incident was the result of an 'unauthorized modification' to its online code. A day after the alarming posts last week, Musk unveiled a new version of the chatbot, Grok 4, on July 9. The Tesla billionaire and former adviser to President Donald Trump, said in June he would retrain the AI platform after expressing frustration with the way Grok answered questions. Musk said the tweaks his xAI company had made to Grok made the chatbot too susceptible to being manipulated by users' questions. AI News: MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell's lawyers fined for AI-generated court filing More: 'MechaHitler': Elon Musk AI firm scrubs chatbot Grok's antisemitic rants 'Grok was too compliant to user prompts,' Musk wrote in a post on X after announcing the new version. 'Too eager to please and be manipulated, essentially. That is being addressed.' Grok 3, which was released in February, is available for free, while the new versions Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy, go for $30 and $300 a month, respectively. Contributing: Jessica Guynn, USA TODAY. Kathryn Palmer is a national trending news reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach her at kapalmer@ and on X @KathrynPlmr. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Musk's xAI apologizes for Grok chatbot's antisemitic responses
