Farmers Nate and Tara Stireman on their Steep Mountain Farm.
Episode Description
This is part two of our exploration of the working waterscape and landcape of Great Salt Lake. In this episode, we turn to farming. Farms across the watershed grow alfalfa, fruits, vegetables and raise livestock for meat and dairy that eventually end up on grocery store shelves. These farms use about 80% of the water that is diverted from the Bear, Weber and Jordan Rivers, Great Salt Lake's tributaries. We talk with farmers in Cache Valley about the challenges they face and pathways forward to stay in the Great Salt Lake Basin that work for both farmers and the lake. One major theme: let's relocalize and connect with our food.
Below is a transcript for Episode 8 of Stay Salty: Lakefacing Stories. Listen to the episode on our Podcast page, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your podcasts.
Episode Transcript
Jaimi Butler: Brine shrimp aren't the only way that Great Salt Lake impacts our human food sources. I like to talk about the minerals. Right? We are extracting minerals out of the lake, particularly thinking about potash. A lot of the farms that you see around us use potash as a fertilizer, so that's going on our crops. And I also like to remember the Great Salt Lake produces a lot of snow that goes into our mountains and falls as lake effect snow, and eventually, like, waters our crops. So you know Great Salt Lake also, you know, means food.
MUSIC FADES OUT
Olivia Juarez: Now I'm praying for Great Salt Lake when I say grace! In the last episode of Stay Salty, we learned about the brine shrimp industry and its irreplaceable role in the global food system, but Jami Butler just said it best: Brine shrimp are but one of many gifts from Great Salt Lake that puts dinner on the table globally. This is part two of our exploration of the working waterscape and landscapes of Great Salt Lake, food, and what it means to stay in the face of ecological collapse at the lake. We now turn to farming on the lands which carry water to our inland sea. You've probably heard that the waters that flow into Great Salt Lake are the lifeblood of our state's farming and ranching industries. Farms across the watershed grow alfalfa, fruits, vegetables and raise livestock for meat and dairy that eventually end up on grocery store shelves. These farms use about 80% of the water that is diverted from the Bear, Weber and Jordan rivers, Great Salt Lake's tributaries.
Meisei Gonzalez: The Stay Salty team knows we need to find creative solutions to address the high water use, but we also aren't down with vilifying farmers. I'm going to be blunt. We all eat. We all need food, but many of us don't grow our own food. We walk down aisles of grocery stores and have little to no connection to the land where the food was grown or the person who harvested it. We expect our food to be convenient and cheap, which I'm guilty of, and I get it. Most of us in this country are living paycheck to paycheck and barely have time to take care of ourselves, but that's also the case for many family farmers. And to be clear, we're not talking about mega corporate farms here. That's a whole other issue that certainly has a negative impact on the lake, the land and workers.
OJ: Agriculture is a complicated and contentious topic that has a big impact on our watershed. It's more than local forces that determine who grows our food and the crops we cultivate. Farming is also influenced by global economic forces and national policy decisions like those made in the Farm Bill. We scratch the surface of these larger issues in this episode, and we hope to dive even deeper in our next season. Our goal today is to understand some of the realities that farmers are facing and to explore possible solutions that work for both farmers and Great Salt Lake.
THEME MUSIC
OJ: In this episode of Stay Salty, we talk with Nate and Tara Stireman, stewards of Steep Mountain Farm, to learn about the challenges that farmers are facing and strategies to implement more sustainable and regenerative farming practices. Then we talk with our neighbors, who are also farmers, Mr. Jim Anderson and Jed Clark, and we bring back our friend Jaimi Butler, who taught us about the brine shrimp industry in the last episode, but then got hooked on farming thanks to the baby goats at Steep Mountain.
MG: We're your hosts, Meisei Gonzalez.
OJ: and Olivia Juarez. You're listening to Stay Salty: Lakefacing Stories.
THEME MUSIC FADES OUT
OJ: In April, I visited Steep Mountain Farm in Cache Valley. The Little Bear River flows along the north edge of the farm, eventually reaching the Bear River, Great Salt Lake's largest tributary downstream. I sat down with Nate and Tara, who own the land, but prefer to call themselves land stewards.
Nate Stireman: My name is Nate Stireman, and I live in Wellsville, here at Steep mountain farm. My title is a Land Steward primarily, and also am part owner to the title of this property.
Tara Stireman: I'm Tara stireman, originally from Ohio, and I'm one of the land stewards here at Steep mountain farm. I also am an LCSW, so I work in the mental health field.
OJ: Can you paint a picture of the river that's flowing through Steep Mountain Farm and how it connects to Great Salt Lake?
NS: Yeah, so the Little Bear River that's right below our property, it comes out of the Bear River Range to our east, and yeah, it sits at a couple of reservoirs: Porcupine Reservoir and Hiram Reservoir, and then it flows by us and flows down into the Cutler marshes, eventually end up in the main Bear River. I could follow it all the way back from the headwaters up in the Uintas, Middle basin and Amethyst basin, beautiful area. I was just up there thinking about how that that is the headwaters of the Bear River, and how the river makes its way all the way it flows north up into Wyoming and and then eventually up into Idaho, and then makes its way back down into Utah, and finally into the Great Salt Lake. So it's got a very interesting meandering story.
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Oj: Tell us about Steep Mountain Farm. What is it that you're growing out here, and anything you want people know about the farm.
NS: At the base is to regenerate and build top soil and build a resilient system. So we have, you know, within, within that system, we have a lot going on. We have a lot of different animals. We raise sheep and goats and turkeys and chickens, and we use them as a manage – a soil biology management strategy and fertility strategy. So, you know, they – they produce a lot of fertility for our gardens as well, not just cycling nutrients in our pastures and fields. But also we don't have to import a lot of nutrients for our gardens. So we use compost. We even use blood for nitrogen that we – when we harvest animals, we salvage that and use that. So pretty, pretty closed system, some might call it regenerative agriculture. Some might call it permaculture. Some might call it Indigenous wisdom, which I think is what we tend to identify with the most, because this is nothing new. I think people have been doing this for ages. We do import feed for animals, primarily the chickens. The feed for the ungulates is all grown right here, so that, you know, they eat that and then they – whatever they excrete stays on the farm in the form of compost, and that's either put out in the gardens or in the fields when we have enough to do that. So by building our top soil and adding organic matter, you know, not over-grazing and rotating our pastures, trying to keep healthy plants and soils – we use less water in turn, more water goes to the Salt Lake. That's our that's our kind of, our mission, our goal, is to not use so much water that we don't need. We're also grateful to have a high water table here, and we don't have to use as much water.
TS: One other part of our mission, or something that we're looking to do, is really build community and look for ways that we can invite folks from Cache Valley or anyone that doesn't really have much experience on a farm to come out and see what we're doing. And I mean, I think that's one of the ways we learn from them, but they're also learning from us. So I think engaging and developing community is, you know, a kind of a secondary goal for us.
NS: I think growing food naturally attracts community, which is awesome. And, yeah, we, aside from growing food, we invite people to come and learn. So we're hosting workshops now where we can teach people how to process their own animals, raise their own animals, backyard poultry.
FARM ANIMAL SOUNDS
OJ: What else is being grown and produced in the neighborhood here?
NS: Cache Valley is, I'd say, pretty, pretty heavy on, you know, dairy and cereal crops, grains and alfalfa. There's, there definitely some smaller farm like veg production farms, the dairy operations use a lot of grain and alfalfa, corn.
OJ: What are the challenges you face as farmers?
NS: Hmm, sometimes it's weather. You know, every season’s different. So a season like last year, we had some pretty cold weather that that posed some challenges for the animals and us. Yeah, personal challenges dealing with snow all winter long. Yeah, when we can, you know, work the soil or work the gardens and get seeds in the ground. So weather, yeah, is a, maybe the first one that comes to mind. Economics, yeah. I mean, our bottom line is not monetary here, so much. You know, we make enough from the farm to support the farm, and that's what's most important to us. We don't want to extract so much off of this land that – just to, for the bottom line, the monetary line, that would be a challenge. If that was the bottom line, it would be a challenge to balance extraction and inputs like, we – surely we could grow some cash crops here and make more money. So, yeah, that's, that's challenging to find that balance, too, because we do, you know, we want to be able to be somewhat profitable while not de-neutering the land.
TS: I really like this question. I think one of the, one of the challenges that we often see is that folks are pretty disconnected from their food source, and so that's one of the things that we're hoping. You know, when someone comes out to visit or asks us about the farm that we're helping them be more connected to, where's their food from, How was their meat raised, just what are they putting into their body. Because of that disconnect, oftentimes, people don't really realize the connection between water use, their food farmers and maybe, like other things that are happening in Utah.
OJ: What could change to make regenerative farming and the things that you're putting out into the community more profitable for y'all?
NS: In general, I think it would require a paradigm shift culturally. Because I think the way that our society tends to value food, and people that grow food is it’s undervalued. And so, you know, people that are trying to care for the land and produce food, it's – it's costly. I mean, I think that we undervalue food. You can get food really cheap at markets, at super stores and stuff. So I think we have this expectation as a culture that our food should be cheap. And there's also, there's a lot of – what's the phrase, like bars to entry due to scale. So, like, if we were to want to scale up and be profitable, I think we'd be sacrificing a lot of the values that we have.
TS: It's really not as much about profit like, the monetary profit that – for us, it is some of the community and what, how is it impacting the land and those, those that are around us that, of course, it would be great if it made a little bit more money. And it's, in a lot of ways, it's not our focus.
MUSIC
NS: The food system, I think, has a lot of requirements that make it hard for a small regenerative operation to thrive, be it, you know, certifications and just the regulations which are important. You know, our food should be regulated and safe. But as a small farmer, without a lot of backing, financial backing, it makes it pretty hard to to get your product out there. And there's subsidies, like we have help from the NRCS, which we get – we get grants to do great things, you know, like build high tunnels and plant diversity in our pastures and increase habitat for pollinators, et cetera. So, but we don't use any of the bigger subsidies that some of the larger farms get. You know, that are producing corn and soy and grains. We raise meat products, and we can't, we can't sell them without going through a lot of red tape. We can't sell them to the public, and the broader public would not want to pay what it's worth. So we just, we just keep it small and, you know, raise it enough for ourselves. I feel for, like, a larger sheep or lamb or meat producer that ends up selling their product low because that's what the customers, the consumers want, low prices. And so I think farmers tend to get kind of, they undervalue themselves, and they have a lot of – a lot of bills to pay too. And so the overall profit is, there's not – It's not much. So I think, like back to just that, the paradigm, the cultural paradigm, about how we value food – that would be a game changer.
OJ: What are you hearing from your fellow farmers on the water situation? What does the community up here think about drying Great Salt Lake and the future of farming?
NS: That becomes a pretty political-driven conversation with people around here and so – and I tend to not engage much in that, those kind of conversations, because I think I differ from a lot of those around me. And not that I don't want to have those conversations, but it's, it's hard to align. And I think that, yeah, people are pretty fired up about it. They feel the blame. And I think, you know, if you go talk to a conventional farmer and mention the word Great Salt Lake, they'll have a lot of a lot of energy behind it.
OJ: Nate and Tara connected us with neighboring farmers to ask what they think. So we drove down the street and talked with Mr. Jim Anderson, whose family has run a dairy for three generations.
Jim Anderson: I’m Jim Anderson and I, well, I try to run a dairy here. My wife is the – the main record keeper and money keeper and bookkeeper. I try to keep all of the junk fixed and running. That's our division of work.
OJ: Thank you. Can you tell me about the farm, what products are cultivated here, and how long you've been here?
JA: Well, we've been working here on this since we were married, which is over 50 years ago. And before that I was – I was helping here as a kid. My grandpa used to own this place, although he never lived here, and I think he bought this place after the war. So well, it's probably been either 1946 or 1947 and it's been in the family since then. We grow mostly corn and alfalfa and barley. It's feed that we rent through the dairy herd, and that's probably the only reason we can keep dairying, because right now, the price of milk is not a whole lot different than it was about 20 years ago, and prices of everything we buy, equipment, parts, fuel, has all gone up substantially, two, three times, maybe four in some cases.
OJ: So you're not making as much money off of the dairy you're producing as it costs to produce it.
JA: Technically, no, that would be correct. And so guys will ask me if I'm still milking cows, and I say, Yeah, but I'm not sure why, and that's a true statement.
OJ: When we rolled up earlier, your nephew, Dallas, was telling us about how he would prefer to be here full time working the farm, and has to supplement his income working from UDOT. How – what is your experience with being able to have a thriving livelihood doing this work? How do you make ends meet?
JA: You, you tighten your belt. You you do without. One case in point, my mother passed away here last year, and we're in the process of trying to buy her home so we can have some control over who, who lives on the place, and we couldn't even qualify for a loan. Our house is paid for, and we couldn't get $150,000 loan, home equity loan, because our income was too low. That's, that's how, that's how we make it. We don't live on much, and we've been relatively healthy, and so medical expenses have been minimal, and we get our milk wholesale and our meat wholesale. So some of the – some of the grocery costs are less than what they would ordinarily be for people, but that's – we, we've never bought a new vehicle for transportation. Everything we got here is used, and we, we keep it going. So that's, that's how we – that's how we keep this operation on its feet.
OJ: Some of the things that I've heard in my community is how farmers are part of the problem of water use, water consumption, and why Great Salt Lake is drying. I want to ask you if you think that you or farmers in general, have been vilified as a reason for Great Salt Lake's diminishment.
JA: I guess it has to be somebody's fault, and there's fewer farmers around than there is new residences. So I guess we're the ones that's going to get vilified, is what it boils down to.
OJ: And what is your hope for Utah's farming future,
JA: My hope is, is that farmers will be allowed what they should have the right to do, and that is to grow food as efficiently and as to be as productive as we can be and to be appreciated when we do it. It is tremendous way of life. There's – there's things that young men and young women can learn on a farm that they don't learn anywhere else, and learning how to work and accomplish things and solve problems. When a piece of equipment breaks down, they scrounge around for a bolt or piece of wire or duct tape or something on that order, and often they can get that thing running their self. So if I had to do it all over again, I'd do it all over again. I wouldn't trade this way of life for anything.
OJ: near Jim's farm, just across the river from Nate and Tara. Jed Clark and his son in law, Scott, have integrated agritourism to raise income on their farm called Little Bear Bottom. In the summer, they have water slides, and in the fall, they run a corn maze with haunted hay rides and a pumpkin patch.
Jed Clark: My name is Jed Clark. I'm, I'm going to be 65 this year, even though I look really young, and I'm trying to pass it on to the next generation, but it boy is sure hard.
Scott: My name is Scott too. I'm Jed’s son-in-law. Over here he, he farms alfalfa. And in this right here, it kind of curves around this way. This is all corn. So there's about 20 acres of corn. And then, so then in these sections, he does grass hay here on the hill. And then we also do pumpkins as you drive down this way – as soon as you turn that's pumpkins in that section along the highway. And then we also do some pumpkins up on top. So that's what's currently being farmed.
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JC: Most farmers aren't trying to get rich. Trust me on that. They're stupid if they're trying to get rich as a farmer, and so they just – they like having the ability to run the land and do be their own man, and it's a crazy living. But you're seeing that they're all getting old now, the younger kids are saying, what a crazy life. It's just the only reason these guys are going to take over, my oldness, is because we're doing the corn maze, and we're making more money on that than we did farming. And so this 75 acres here wouldn't be really viable to make a living on. I think we could make at the most if we had everything, top notch alfalfa and everything, we'd make $20,000 a year. Couldn't do a family on that. And so then you say, well, I've got to try though. I've got water, I've got land, so I'm going to do it. And then most people, throughout the years in Wellsville have always gone over to thichol and worked at other places and then came back and farmed on the side as a hobby farmer, that's what pretty well everybody in this entire little area that I know of, that's what they did, is they had to have a job somewhere else to make it viable. And so that's where we're at. And so, like I say, if you want any of these farmers to stay in it, even for a hobby, you got to say, what can we do to help? We've been here for 20 – almost 30 years. Almost 30 years.
Scott: Well, there's no manual either, right?
JC: No, there's no manual.
Scott: No one teaches you exactly how much to water, right? You – it's by feel. And you kind of, know based on–
JC: Some people do it because their neighbors watering. Well, my neighbor’s watering so I gotta water and it was like, Well, how come your neighbors watering? Well, he said that somebody else was said. And so I swear they, if they – and I hate bureaucrats, though, because too often they get involved in it and they know nothing about it. And so I'd rather say, let's get a farmer who knows about water and stuff like that that say, Hey, how can we help you and learn some things that to preserve water, to say what's happening in the water? I mean, it'd be fun to do some tests here and just say how much water is flowing through this area. But if you ever get up on the you know, go out there the highway that way and look out over the Cache Valley, it's just water. Ponds, the river, t's just, you ought to look at it sometime. Take a picture of it. This whole valley is just one big swamp going from one end to the other. And so there's tons of water, but everybody in Cache Valley is like, we don't want Salt Lake to have any of it. It's our water. And and yet, I would dare say that there's enough for both. If we worked on it and said, What can we do?
MUSIC
OJ: What motivated you to to install the pivot here in lieu of the flooding that you were doing before?
JC: The government paid for half of it. And, you know, call me a welfare recipient, whatever you want to call me, I was just like, holy cow. And it's, it's so nice, especially for the corn maze, I don't think we could do it without the pivot, because of the way it waters, and we use so little of water comparatively to the flooding. And you know, we didn't know we're getting into the corn maze business. When we did it, it was all a matter of the government was saying, Hey, we can cut your amount of water that's being used here drastically by helping you buy this pivot. And right now, when we were watering out of the spring, the only thing that got watered is that little bit right over there. And now you look at it clear over to the white plastic over there, all the way through here, all the way to the blue outhouse is all watered by the same water that used to do that little section right over there. And so you just say, and all it took, I think we we paid 48,000 for the pivot, and we got snickered a little bit by somebody, but we ended up paying, I think, 29,000 of our own money. No, they paid 29,000 and we paid the rest. And so – it’s at the time, we had no money. We weren't in the corn maze business. I could probably afford buying one now. The corn maze makes a lot more money than farming does.
Scott: It seems to me like if people really wanted to try to save water for the Great Salt Lake, then they would be doing stuff like this for pivots, right? They would say, okay, every farm that we can, we're going to pay the farmer to put these pivots in that will naturally save water, right? You don't have to do anything beyond install this to save water. It will naturally happen. Like he can't use the same amount of water now because of the pivot. So if you want to save water, if you want to divert it from the farmers that are flood irrigating, well, you need to approach them and offer to put these in.
JC: Because they can't afford them, especially – there's not enough money in farming to afford it.
MUSIC
OJ: Mr. Anderson, the dairy farmer, said he's also working on getting some grants for infrastructure to efficiently manage water on his farm. Most of his grounds are flood irrigated, so measures to line water canals or moving water through pipes instead of the flooding system could save water. Tara and Nate told us more about these resources for farmers to optimize their operations.
NS: There are resources out there. There's, you know, like the NRCS does great work.
OJ: The NRCS is –
NS: the Natural Resources Conservation Service. It's a branch of the USDA. They give grants, and they have resources. They, you know, they do workshops and education, soil fertility, organic matter, you know, rain, how to manage range land. There's a lot of room for that. Those resources to be tapped into more. It's a little tricky. I mean, it's competitive. You know, there's only so much money to go around, so if somebody wants to do better, they have to get in there and get the get the grants. The NRCS and the UDAF – Utah Department of Agriculture and Food – have grants available for water optimization. So basically, just taking whatever existing water application system you have and improving it. For us, the next most logical thing would be subsurface drip irrigation, so that, you know, you have, you’re putting drip drip lines underneath the surface of the soil and minimizing a lot of evapotranspiration. Saves a lot of water, and it's it's overall better for crops. So yeah, we've applied for the grants for that through the, through UDAF and NRCS, and crossing our fingers that we get them both, because one alone wouldn't cover even half of the the cost. So it's really, it's really expensive to switch, like we're talking, you know, for three and a half to seven acres of subsurface drip is looking at like 65, $70,000
OJ: Utah's agricultural water optimization program has allocated millions of dollars to save water on farms, but a November audit of these dollars found that it needs better accounting to know if it even works and gets water to Great Salt Lake. A recent state bill passed which allows farmers to get paid for conserving water and letting it flow downstream. It does not, however, ensure that the saved water is delivered to Great Salt Lake. Another bill introduced this session would have required the state to report how much water is saved and where it ends up, but it was killed.
MG: One thing I've learned about working up on the hill is a lot of really great ideas end up going nowhere.
MUSIC
OJ: A lot of the blame for the problem at Great Salt Lake is put on farmers. Are there any misconceptions that you would like to challenge about that argument?
NS: don't know if they're necessarily misconceptions, but maybe back to the cultural paradigm about how we value food. If people are blaming farmers and they're not growing their own food, how are we going to eat? So I'd say there's just a disconnect there, maybe, that if we're going to blame farmers for the late drying up, well then let's all get together and figure out how to farm better. Also, I think that we've kind of gotten ourselves into a rut, because we've – as consumers – have supported farming the way it's been industrial farming, the way it's been happening long enough that now we're seeing the consequences.
TS: I think one of the – I don't know if it's necessarily a misconception, but one of the other ideas is that maybe farmers are not interested in making change or doing things different. And I think just from our experiences, and some of the things I've heard Nate talk about is that farmers really do want to be part of the change, like that. They really believe in what they're doing. It's part of their lifestyle. It's really important to them, and so they feel really connected to the land, and they want to be part of, part of the change. And something that we've noticed since joining the valley about nine years ago is that there's not a lot of ways for all of these people or systems to be connected, that there's some, you know, individual organizations that work specifically within maybe their category. But I think that there's just not a lot of ways where farmers are really engaged in that process, and that we really hope to be part of that. Like to really maybe start some of that and and help folks be connected to how all these different, you know, systems impact the Great Salt Lake. In some ways, we don't even really need to talk about the Great Salt Lake if we're just talking about, how can we support things that are happening in the valley, or make better choices for how well you know what our environmental impact is in Utah.
OJ: Jamie Butler, the brine shrimp biologist you heard from earlier, has been living in Cache Valley for the past few years, and recently moved to Steep Mountain Farm.
MG: She heard us kiki’ing and wanted to spill some tea.
OJ: Though we were drinking coffee.
Jaimi Butler: I think there's a misconception that all farms are the same. And the reality is, is that this is a really big place where the Bear River kind of travels from the headwaters into Great Salt Lake. And, you know, lots of it is primarily agricultural. Not all of those farms are the same. And the farm that I moved to, to come to Cache Valley, is a dry farm. So the folks that homesteaded that land, even pre-1900, were trying to grow more crops in an arid place, and they don't water and they grow alfalfa, and they grow winter wheat, and what comes out of the sky as rain or snow is what waters that. And, you know, there's lots of different soil types, there's lots of different topography, there's lots of different things. And so I see blanket statements of farmers doing this or not doing that and and the truth is, is that there's a, like, wide ecosystem of farmers and land and topography and all of the things that that – there's not just like one solution, like, stop growing alfalfa. That's not like, really, like, um, helpful or feasible, and all farms aren't the same.
NS: We're still going to grow crops, and there's heavier water users than alfalfa. So alfalfa has been vilified, and it's not just alfalfa. There are a lot of heavy water users. And, say generally, if we can localize our food source, we'll be – we'll all be better off, and there will be less water used, because I think that, I mean our hunger for, for meat as a society. I mean not to vilify meat, because it's not meat that's bad, it's how much we consume of it. I think that's where a lot of the crops that we grow are for meat production. They go to feedlots and whatnot, and takes a lot of water to grow an animal, any animal, especially on a feedlot.
OJ: Do you see the students and volunteers’ perceptions and relationships with food change after they leave a visit here at Steep Mountain Farm?
TS: Yes. I mean, yes. I think people, it absolutely impacts how people think and feel and are connected to their food. And I think it's undervalued when you know someone can come to the farm and talk to Nate and have him talk about the systems that we have here and what we're doing, and that you can connect with the person who's making your food or that's providing something for you. And I think just overall, folks that come and visit or volunteer or spend a season here, or just a day or an experience, that it does shift the way they see their food or what they're eating, and the nutritional value. I think just interacting with the farmer and being able to walk around with someone or just hear what we're doing here – I think it absolutely makes a difference. I mean, I think one of the things that I often hear Nate talking about is that the importance of the community, and I often hear him inviting folks to come and visit and just share your thoughts, and what can we learn from you, and also hope that folks are going to be learning things from us. And that, I mean, I think for myself, the bigger picture is then the mental health piece and our just our overall well being, and that when we, when we're connected or connected to people and communities and to our food, that that just naturally lends to our well-being, and that we often hear, you know, from folks that have, like, had an experience here or stayed a season, just the difference in how they feel when they leave. And, I mean, there's a lot of great research that supports this, and it's really great to just see it in action and have people like actually, really experience it
NS: When people eat well and feel well, I think they're better equipped to care for the land well, and then an In turn, the land cares for that's cyclical. I see it.
JB: I mean, my personal experience is like, there's – coming, you know, from Salt Lake City and not being connected to my food, definitely in the last couple years, and way more connected to my food. Nate and Tara tricked me into coming because they had baby goats. That was like my gateway to Steep Mountain Farm.
GOAT SOUNDS
JB: And I think even bigger picture is there's, like this community of people that have different beliefs in different cultures that are all coming together over this common denominator of food.
TS: I think one other really important piece is that not everyone you know, like us, can just pick up and leave their life in the city and move to the country and like, land steward on a farm and do what we do. And so we're really hoping that, when you know, if you come here for a simple experience, that sure you might not be able to grow your own food or do these things, but then how can you still support it and improve your own nutrition? And yeah, just that by inviting folks to the farm, that we hope that, yeah, they, in turn, can then support others in their community,
OJ: How are y'all here at Steep Mountain Farm and in the valley feeling about the future of Great Salt Lake?
NS: The direction some of the conversations are going, I think, are going in the right direction. You know, we talk a lot about the lake and like band-aids, which I think are needed, like short term, how do we address this right now, and lately, we've been talking a lot more about how we look at the system, and how we how we farm differently, how we treat the land, which I think is the long term vision. So I'm hopeful that we can start to address the long term gain.
TS: Yeah, me too, I'm optimistic, and I think it is probably going to take some, like, what you were saying, Nate, is, there's some short term band-aids, and then some, like, more immediate, maybe hardships or challenges, like things that I think – there's going to be some growing pains and that are, I think one of the questions is, is, Are folks willing to work through some of those growing pains with more of a long term goal? That I think we get really caught up in the short term, and that what we're really trying to do is look at the long term goals.
OJ: What are some of those short term growing pains?
TS: I mean, I think, like most change, I mean, change is just hard, like we we get used to doing things a certain way, and then sometimes it's like being told what to do, or when there's things that are imposed on us when they don't seem like choice, I think that can be challenging. I think we get pretty set in our ways. There can be some financial challenges where things up front cost money. We actually might have to make some sacrifices, like we might not be able to do it all.
NS: Dealing with the lake drying up is also is helping us reach a tipping point, I think, to where now we're, you know, maybe highlighting some of the general like, ways that we use land and ways that we treat land and water and our whole ecosystem. Though, if we're – if we start to look at that closer, I think it's great, because we need that tipping point to get people to wake up and look at how to do things differently. And I think one of the biggest challenges is going to be that transition for a conventional farmer that's been on a family farm for ages to make the transition to a more resilient system.
JB: I'd like to talk about change, because I think you know, really the solution for Great Salt Lake and for the entire watershed, including the Bear River, is adaptive management of all of these in perpetuity. And that means, like, keeping our thumb on the water bank account and making sure that we have the water going to the right place, or, you know, maybe in those years where there's lots of water, you know, we can fill up our reservoirs more, and we can do some of these things. And so it's like, you don't just ask people to change once. With that, you ask people to be, like, adaptive, and change all the time, depending on what the system is.
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JB: I'm not known for a lot of hope, and I wrote an obituary about Great Salt Lake. And so I think of it more, not as hope, but as as possibilities like, there's so many possibilities for what our lake and what our watershed can be. And I think we as a society need to get over that, like short term discomfort of these conversations, and not have this long term dysfunction. I think of it more as, like, possibilities and committing to long term changes, and what we're doing in the Bear River, how we're managing water at Great Salt Lake, and everything in the 22,000 square miles of watershed.
MG: Okay, that was a lot of really good background and a tea on just how complicated the farming situation is.
OJ: It was also such an ecological journey. I'm thinking about that glistening corn snow up in Amethyst Basin melting down to the Little Bear River to nourish Great Salt Lake, and those no till fields at Steep Mountain Farm.
MG: So poetic. I wish I could have joined you, Olivia, but hey, maybe we'll see some of y'all at Steep Mountain Farm soon. Definitely reach out on Instagram at Of Salt and Sand if you visit. We'd love to hear your experience at the farm.
Next time, we look deeper into the history of Cache Valley and a restoration effort led by the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation at Wuda Ogwa, the site of the Bear River Massacre. Long before Mormon settlers started farming in the area, the Northwestern Shoshone hunted, gathered and lived along the banks of the Bear River. Now the Tribe is reclaiming their ancestral land and building bridges with farmers to repair the land and one another.
THEME MUSIC
MG: If you like what you're hearing, leave us a review on Spotify or Apple podcasts. Stay Salty: Lakefacing Stories is an Of Salt and Sand production. We explore what it means to stay in Utah through economic transition and climate crisis by producing multimedia projects with, by, and for impacted communities.
OJ: The producers are Maria Archibald, Amelia Diehl and Brooke Larsen. Podcast cover art is by Frances Ngo. Our visual director is Jeri Gravlin. Ashley Finley and Katherine Quaid are our event curators. Music is by Amelia Diehl. We're your hosts, Olivia Juarez
MG: and Meisei Gonzalez.
OJ: This project is funded by grants and foundations, which you can find on our website. Today, we thank two donors, Elena Romero Padilla and John Trent. Gracias! Please join them in supporting our work by donating at Lakefacing.org. until next time
OJ + MG: Stay salty!
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