Many Wasatch Front counties will lose a substantial portion agricultural land to urban development while southern Utah counties will remain for the most part untouched, according to Utah House Committee statistics.
According to statistics from the Utah House committee, Iron County will lose up to 5 percent of its agricultural land to development in the next 20 years, while Utah County, the county producing the most revenue, will lose over 20 percent.
According to a study published by Utah State University Jan. 25, the Utah revenue in 2008 from agriculture and other contributing industries, such as product manufacturing, was $15.2 billion for total economic output.
According to the study, the counties leading in the Utah agriculture industry are Utah, Millard, Beaver, Box Elder, Cache, Sanpete and Iron counties. These six counties account for nearly two-thirds of agricultural revenue.
Utah lost 500,000 acres of farmland between 2003 and 2008, according to the Utah Department of Agriculture.
Chad Gasser, assistant professor of agriculture, said in those years in which swathes of agricultural land were being transformed into housing, the nation was experiencing an economic boom in terms of housing revenues.
Gasser said with the economic downturn, the housing industry stopped demanding more land because the public was not demanding houses. Therefore, the stress at least in Iron County went down, he said.
Cedar City farmer Brent Hunter, 65, said in the 1970s he sold some of his land to a contractor with the belief the income from the land he sold would subsidize his farming operation, however, it did not.
“Didn’t work out that way,” he said. “Turned out my farming operation subsidized the subdivision.”
Hunter said even in the good times it is difficult to make money off of housing. Right now the economics are not there for a farmer to sell their land to the developments, he said.
He said the only reason a farmer would sell their land is to make money and the way it looks now, a farmer would be just as well off keeping it and farming the land.
Two weeks ago, the Utah House of Representatives pushed aside HB 102, the Agriculture Sustainability Act.
According to the Utah Department of Agriculture, the bill would have protected the farmland in Utah allowing the farmer to sell the prime land to the government.
According to the Department of Agriculture, the state would pay for the land through taxes from agricultural land owners and the land would stay in the agriculture production.
The land would be available for the farmer to stay on the land as a type of tenant for several years.
Agriculture Commissioner Leonard Blackham said in the Department of Agriculture’s 2009 report that the world’s population is not getting any smaller.
“It’s taken civilization 4,000 years to develop a food production system that is barely feeding the 6.7 billion people on our planet,” Blackham said.
He said with the world population projected to increase to nearly 9 billion by 2050, and our agricultural lands on the decline, we will require a doubling of agriculture production on smaller pieces of land. Lt. Gov. Greg Bell expressed concerns about the loss of land at the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Conference on Jan. 11 in Salt Lake City.
He said HB 102 is the type of initiative we need. The United States needs to decide if it is going to get its produce from home or abroad.
He said there is a danger in importing foods from abroad just as there has been dangers inherent in importing oils. Namely that the US imports oil from some countries that do not hold the same political philosophies that we do, Bell said.
“In a world that is free of political division and war that may make sense, but we’re not,” Bell said. “We can be hijacked.”
Southern Utah University suunews.com > News
Utah statistics project varied farm outlooks
Published: Sunday, March 7, 2010
Updated: Sunday, March 7, 2010
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