The Great Salt Lake is a commons problem. Irrigated alfalfa in the basin consumes an estimated 537,000–606,000 acre-feet of water per year — up to 93% of what the lake needs to stabilize. But this isn't a story about bad farmers. It's a story about water rights, economic incentives, and institutional structures that make the rational individual choice collectively catastrophic.
Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize proving that the tragedy of the commons is not inevitable. Communities can govern shared resources — but only with transparency, good institutions, and political will. Save the Commons exists to provide the transparency. The political will is up to us.
Save the Commons was built by Josh Allred, a Utah resident who believed the state's own public data deserved a public interface. Every field boundary, every irrigation method, every acre-foot estimate on this site comes from government datasets that anyone can access — but that nobody had made legible. This project is a transparency tool designed to complement the advocacy organizations already working to save the lake, not compete with them.
Every number on this site comes from public data. Here's exactly how we processed it.
Utah Division of Water Resources — Water Related Land Use (WRLU) Survey, 2024
This is a public dataset published by the State of Utah. It contains polygon geometries for every agricultural parcel in the state, with attributes including crop type, irrigation method, acreage, county, and basin.
services1.arcgis.com/99lidPhWCzftIe9K/ArcGIS/rest/services/WaterRelatedLandUse/FeatureServer/0
We queried the WRLU FeatureServer with the following filters:
Description = 'Alfalfa'
AND State = 'Utah'
AND Basin IN ('Bear River', 'Weber River', 'Jordan River', 'Utah Lake')
There is no "Great Salt Lake" basin in the dataset. The four basins above are the hydrological tributaries to the GSL. "West Desert" was excluded as hydrologically ambiguous.
Results were paginated (1,000 records per request) and exported as GeoJSON. Polygon geometry was simplified to 15% using mapshaper to reduce file size while preserving field boundaries.
Evapotranspiration (ET) rates for alfalfa by irrigation method:
| Method | ET Rate (AF/ac/yr) | Source |
|---|---|---|
| ● Flood | 5.0–5.5 | USU Extension; Utah Agricultural Water Optimization Task Force |
| ● Sprinkler | 3.0–3.5 | USU Extension; published ET studies |
| ● Dry Crop | 0 | Rain-fed only; no consumptive diversion |
The 650,000 AF/yr lake stabilization figure comes from the Great Salt Lake Commissioner's Office and published hydrological studies.
We believe in transparency. The GeoJSON file powering the interactive map is available for download. Use it for your own analysis, reporting, or projects.
Have corrections, additional data, or want to collaborate? Save the Commons welcomes fact-checks, contributions, and media inquiries.
16,924 alfalfa fields. 166,573 acres. All mapped and color-coded.