Honestly, no one should be using water to grow alfalfa in Utah. The way Western water law currently works with prior appropriation encourages extremely wasteful

Honestly, no one should be using water to grow alfalfa in Utah. The way Western water law currently works with prior appropriation encourages extremely wasteful uses of water, just because they don’t want to lose their valuable water allocations (use it or lose it). Alfalfa is a VERY water intensive crop, growing it in the desert wouldn’t make sense without these perverse incentives. There’s a lot of effects, but one very visible one in Utah is the fact that the Great Salt Lake is drying out, because too much water is being diverted from its tributaries. Now there’s dust getting stirred up from the exposed lake bed that’s chock full of heavy metals, which is less than ideal next to a fairly big city.