At first glance, the bucolic, green pasturelands framing Wasatch Back towns like Heber City, Kamas and Peoa seem worlds away from Great Salt Lake’s receding shores. Yet the connection between the two runs deep. It’s this intrinsic link that Summit Land Conservancy has zeroed in on to help give the imperiled lake a fighting chance.
CEO Cheryl Fox co-founded Summit Land Conservancy in 2002 based on a vision of fairness. “It’s about that last farmer on the road,” she explains, “The one who’s held out and resisted selling to a developer long after all the farms around them have become subdivisions.” Through conservation easements—voluntary, legally-binding agreements that permanently protect land from development—landowners can continue to own and farm their land by tapping into its equity. Summit Land Conservancy has helped dozens of families safeguard their properties from development with conservation easements, properties like the 121-acre Osguthorpe Ranch in Park City, the 96-acre Andrus Ranch in the Kamas Valley, and the 5,000-acre Warrior Rizen Ranch in Morgan.
But in recent years, increasing development pressure and news of the Great Salt Lake’s looming demise have expanded Summit Land Conservancy’s purview. The Wasatch Back cradles the Weber, Provo and Bear Rivers, which collectively serve as the lake’s primary inflow. The Wasatch Back is also in a building boom, fed by record real estate sales and high-profile developments like Deer Valley’s East Village, Wasatch Peaks Resort and Powder Mountain. The result is the suburban spread of once small towns into the surrounding farmlands. “But protecting open space is not only about preserving a way of life, it’s also about protecting water,” Fox says.
Farmland, Fox explains, is a critical player in the hydrology system sustaining the entire Great Salt Lake Watershed. In fact, much of the water farmers use to irrigate their crops goes back into the watershed. “About 50 percent of the water used to irrigate alfalfa, for example, flows downstream,” says Deputy State Water Engineer Blake Bingham.
Alarmed by predictions that the Great Salt Lake could vanish by 2030, Summit Land Conservancy launched its Utah Headwaters Initiative in 2023—an ambitious plan to triple the number of acres it protects within the headwaters of the Weber, Bear and Provo River Watersheds. Since then, while the Conservancy continues to use conservation easements as a tool in land preservation, it now places increased emphasis on partnering with the landowners within these watersheds, working with them to adopt stream restoration practices and upland land management activities that help improve aquatic habitat and conserve water. “If we don’t work to save the remaining undeveloped land around these rivers,” says Caitlin Willard, Summit Land Conservancy vice president of communications, “they will be developed and the water feeding these rivers will be sucked into municipal water systems and never have the chance to flow downstream to the lake.”
Still, putting land into a conservation easement takes time—usually anywhere from two to five years—time that the Great Salt Lake does not have. To fast-track saving these critical watershed lands, Summit Land Conservancy launched its For The Future Fund campaign, a five-year effort to raise $10 million to protect 36,000 additional acres of the Great Salt Lake’s Watershed in four counties across the Wasatch Back. The fund gives the conservancy cash on hand to act quickly when a critical watershed property comes on the market, as well as enhances its ability to take advantage of federal funding. “Donations from individuals are crucial to what we do,” Willard says. “Without support from individuals, we would not be able to access the federal dollars that make these transactions possible.”
The Historic Monastery Farm in Huntsville is a particularly striking example of how Summit Land works with landowners to help mitigate the Great Salt Lake crisis. Once run by Trappist monks, the 1,600-acre property was rescued from development in 2016 by Bill White, a retired water attorney who worked with Summit Land Conservancy to place 1,050 acres of the farm into conservation easements. Last summer, the Historic Monastery Farm became one of the first farms in Utah to apply for an instream flow amendment, which allows water rights holders to temporarily lease a portion of their water to the state to benefit the Great Salt Lake.
Leasing water rights was made possible in 2022 through House Bill 33, legislation that changed the state’s 150-year-old “use it or lose it” water rights statute. “It was revolutionary,” Fox says. Furthermore, through the Great Salt Lake Watershed Enhancement Trust, water rights holders are eligible for compensation for leasing water rights to benefit the lake.
Hannah Freeze, deputy Great Salt Lake commissioner, is hopeful other farmers will follow the Historic Monastery Farm’s lead. “It’s a big lift to unravel 150 years of how things have been done,” she says. “But early adopters are the key to making instream flow amendments a success that works for both farmers and the lake.”
During the coming 2026 growing season, Kenny McFarland, a sixth-generation farmer who manages the Historic Monastery Farm, will establish cover crops on the 215 acres he and White identified for dry farming to supply the extra water they plan to send downstream to the lake. And then, if the Utah State Water Engineer approves their application, beginning in the 2027 water year, the farm will send 650 acre feet of its water down to Great Salt Lake’s Willard Bay via Pine View Reservoir.
While 650 acre feet may seem like a lot, in the context of Great Salt Lake, it’s a literal drop in the bucket. To bring the lake up to the 4,198-foot goal Governor Spencer Cox hopes to hit by the 2034 Salt Lake City Olympic Winter Games, an additional 1 million acre feet of water will need to reach the lake each year between now and then.
Despite the enormity of this task—one that everyone agrees will take many different approaches—the prospect of helping save the Great Salt Lake by conserving land seems to be resonating with Wasatch Back landowners. In 2025 alone, Summit Land Conservancy safeguarded more than 5,000 acres, including Marchant Meadows, 86 acres along the Weber River in Peoa, and Bally Watts Ranch, 2,772 acres southeast of Huntsville that safeguards clean water flowing into Pineview Reservoir and the Ogden River.
Summit Land Conservancy continues to advance other projects across northern Utah as well. “We’re working with the City of Oakley on several projects,” Fox says. “We’re protecting the public benefit of the Homestead Resort redevelopment, We also partner with other Utah-based land trusts, like Bear River Conservancy and Ogden Valley Land Trust and The Nature Conservancy, to support land conservation across the state.”
As of November 2025, Summit Land Conservancy had raised $5.5 million of its $10 million goal, enabling it to protect 11,000 of the 36,000 acres of critical watershed lands it’s targeting to place in conservation easement by May 2028. “The private donations made to the For The Future Fund allow [Summit Land Conservancy] to keep doing what we do,” says Fox, “keeping open space open on the Wasatch Back, and playing our part to give Great Salt Lake a fighting chance.”
Giving Credit Where it’s Due
With or without conservation easements, farmers are always looking for ways to save water, says Jamila McFarland, who, with her husband, Kenny, manages the Historic Monastery Farm in Huntsville, as well as several hundred acres of the McFarland Family farms in West Weber. “Water efficiency is a top priority for us.” Jamila says.
The acute sense of stewardship the McFarlands feel toward the lands they steward is something Fox has witnessed with all the farm families she’s worked with since co-founding Summit Land Conservancy more than 20 years ago. “A farmer’s connection to the land is as deep as it is to their family,” she says. “Anyone who spends time outdoors on the land will tell you the land speaks to them.”
Donations to Summit Land’s For the Future Fund can be made here.
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