Southern Utah Dairy Farm Saves Water With Nontraditional Crop

By Addison Stoddard

Cows are being milked all day long at the Holt Dairy farm, located in New Castle. Utah Farm Bureau members and attendees of the Utah Hay and Forage Symposium visited the dairy operation this month to learn how the dairy is feeding their cows.

A concern over losing water led the owners to experiment with different crops that are more water efficient. Kimball Holt said water usage will change in the next century.

"We're going to lose 50% of our water over the next 100 years. So we started working with the state saying, 'if we're going to lose our water, we need to have better tools,' Kimball said.

One of the ways that Holt Dairy is succeeding at conserving water is incorporating different crops and monitoring water usage.

"We put meters on all of our wells to measure how much gallonage we were using, and then over time, we found that we were using significantly less water on these other crops, on corn, on triticale," Kimball said.

Triticale, a hybrid of wheat and rye, is interceded with alfalfa, and has shown to use less water while also providing more yield.