Who's Actually Using the Water? — The Weber County Hive

Explainer

The sector split, two ways

Statewide, agriculture dominates by a wide margin. Inside the Great Salt Lake Basin specifically, the mix shifts toward municipal and industrial use.

Same data, at a glance

SOURCE: SAME AS BAR CHART BELOW — UTAH CONSERVATION/AG AGENCY DATA VIA KSL, UTAH FOUNDATION

pie showData
    title Utah statewide water use, by sector
    "Agriculture" : 82
    "Commercial and industrial" : 8
    "Residential, outdoor/lawns" : 6
    "Residential, indoor" : 4

Utah statewide water use, by sector

SOURCE: UTAH CONSERVATION/AG AGENCY DATA VIA KSL, UTAH FOUNDATION

Agriculture

82%

Residential (indoor)

3–4%

Residential (outdoor/lawns)

Commercial / Industrial

Two different questions, easy to mix up: "diversion" is water pulled from a source; "depletion" is water actually consumed or otherwise removed from the system, not returned. The statewide 82% figure above is a diversion figure. The Great Salt Lake Basin chart below is a depletion figure — a different, more lake-relevant measurement, and not directly comparable to the 82% number. Both are real and sourced; they're just answering different questions.

Great Salt Lake Basin, human-caused water depletion by category, 2020–2024

SOURCE: UTAH DIVISION OF WATER RESOURCES, GREAT SALT LAKE BASIN WATER BUDGET (UPDATED MODEL); GREAT SALT LAKE STRIKE TEAM

Agriculture

65%

Municipal & industrial

26.8%

Great Salt Lake mineral extraction

5.7%

Agricultural incidental losses

1.4%

Reservoir evaporation

1.1%

These five categories sum to 100% of human-caused depletion in the basin. The Great Salt Lake Strike Team's own framing: "all sectors contribute to depletions in the basin and no single sector can bear the full responsibility for restoring the lake."

These shares moved substantially in the state's own revised model — not because urban use suddenly spiked, but because the accounting improved. Earlier versions of Utah's water budget attributed about 73.8% of basin depletion to agriculture and 16.4% to municipal/industrial use. The updated model (averaged 1989–2023) puts those shares at roughly 65.1% and 26.3%. The state attributes the shift mainly to outdoor water use: earlier modeling assumed about 40% of outdoor municipal water was depleted; new research puts that figure at roughly 91%. In other words, most water applied to lawns and landscaping was always being lost to evaporation and plant use — the old model just wasn't capturing it.

Residential depletion is overwhelmingly an outdoor story

SOURCE: UTAH DIVISION OF WATER RESOURCES, GREAT SALT LAKE BASIN WATER BUDGET, 2024 DATA

Outdoor (lawns, landscaping)

96.9% of residential depletion

Indoor

3.1% of residential depletion

Residential use is ~61% of all municipal & industrial depletion in the basin. Lawn watering alone depleted an estimated 408,500 acre-feet in 2024 — equal to roughly a quarter of the basin's agricultural depletion. Indoor residential depletion has stayed comparatively small and nearly constant from 1989 to 2024, even as the basin's population doubled — because indoor water mostly returns to the system after treatment, while outdoor water mostly doesn't.

A widely repeated "households are only 3% of use" figure most closely matches indoor residential use specifically — Utah Rivers Council states indoor household use "consumes a mere 3-4%." Outdoor residential (mostly lawns) is a separate ~6% on top of that. Stated here as "indoor household use," not "households," so the outdoor share isn't implied away.

The 82% isn't one thing: what "agriculture" breaks down into

SOURCE: SALT LAKE TRIBUNE / GREAT SALT LAKE COLLABORATIVE, "ONE CROP USES MORE THAN HALF OF UTAH'S WATER," NOV. 2022; UTAH FOUNDATION

Alfalfa & hay, alone

68%

Rest of Utah agriculture

~14%

Everything non-agricultural

18%

Bars are share of total statewide water diversions (not share of agriculture's 82% alone). One crop, grown on nearly three-fourths of Utah's irrigated cropland, accounts for more water than every other use in the state — agricultural and non-agricultural — combined.

Who's actually growing it? There is no public, ranked list of Utah's largest alfalfa growers by acreage — ownership of the state's roughly 490,000 irrigated alfalfa acres is scattered across county assessor and water-right records, not one directory. One named, sourced example: the Laub family (Beryl, Iron County) grows about 10,000 tons of alfalfa a year, compressed into cubes, with roughly a third of their output — and, they say, roughly a third of Utah hay overall — exported to Japan and Taiwan. Utah's largest landowners generally (the Robinson and Freed families, ~300,000 acres; the Holding family) run cattle-grazing operations, which is a different category from irrigated alfalfa cropland and shouldn't be read as the same thing.

The Laub name in Utah's own water-right records (reconciliation in progress)

SOURCE: UTAH DIVISION OF WATER RIGHTS, OWNER-NAME SEARCH RESULTS ("LAUB") — PARTIAL, DEDUPLICATION NOT YET COMPLETE

Laub Properties, LLC — single largest certificate (a26360, 8 wells)

4,922.95 ac-ft

Normand D. & Barbara Ruth Family Partnership — largest certificate (a17732, 13 wells)

4,447.38 ac-ft

A statewide-total figure for all "Laub"-named water rights is not included here, because the underlying records make one unreliable without careful deduplication first. Utah's water-right database indexes the same right under every name it has ever been associated with — one application number (a20000, 428.24 ac-ft) appears under three different entity names in these records (an LLC, a living trust, a family trust). Several other figures (1,670.70 ac-ft; 288.11 ac-ft; a 1.0 ac-ft claim tied to Normand C. & Rue Thella/Thells) recur under different application numbers with statuses suggesting one right moving through filing stages (withdrawn, amended, re-certificated) rather than separate, independent rights. A naive sum of every line in a name search overcounts these. What's solid: the two certificates above are each real, single, distinct rights, both concentrated in Iron County (the same region as the Beryl alfalfa operation Fox 13 profiled), and both are large by any measure. A properly deduplicated statewide total — built from unique certificate numbers, active-status rights only — would need to be compiled before publishing an aggregate figure.

That "18% non-agricultural," broken down step by step

SOURCE: SAME STATEWIDE SECTOR DATA AS ABOVE (KSL / UTAH FOUNDATION) — THE THREE NON-AG SLICES ADD TO THE 18% FIGURE

1. Residential, indoor

3–4% of statewide total

2. Residential, outdoor/lawns

6% of statewide total

3. Commercial & industrial (all of it)

8% of statewide total

Bars here are scaled to each other (largest = 8% = full width), not to the full 100% statewide chart above — so the relative sizes read clearly at this smaller scale. Add the three and you get the ~18% "everything non-agricultural" figure. Data centers, golf courses, and other individually-named users elsewhere in this piece are already counted inside "commercial & industrial" — they are not a fourth, separate slice.

"Commercial & industrial" (8% of statewide total): how much of it is actually named anywhere?

SOURCE: TOTAL DIVERSIONS 5.1M AC-FT/YR (SALT LAKE TRIBUNE, NOV. 2022) × 8% = ~408,000 AC-FT/YR C&I, COMPARED AGAINST FIGURES ELSEWHERE IN THIS PIECE

Untracked / no named-user data

~383,600 ac-ft/yr (est.)

Golf courses (2022, reported)

~23,600 ac-ft/yr

Named data centers (disclosed)

~810 ac-ft/yr

This is a back-of-envelope estimate, not an official state breakdown — no agency publishes commercial/industrial water use by sub-category. It's built by taking the ~408,000 ac-ft/yr implied by the 8% statewide figure and subtracting the two specifically-named user categories tracked elsewhere in this piece (golf courses' reported total — not the extrapolated ~31,500 ac-ft figure from the callout below, which assumes 100% reporting — and the five named data centers' disclosed usage converted from gallons at 325,851 gal/ac-ft). Even added together, golf and the named data centers account for roughly 6% of the commercial/industrial slice — meaning the large majority of it (retail, offices, manufacturing, mining, and every unnamed data center or facility) has no public, named-user accounting at all.

A widely repeated "agriculture is just 0.02% of GDP" figure appears to be a decimal error. Utah Rivers Council's own materials state alfalfa and hay specifically — not agriculture as a whole — account for 0.2% of Utah's GDP while using more than half the state's water (the Tribune's reporting puts alfalfa/hay's water share even higher, at 68% of all diversions). Agriculture broadly runs closer to under 1% (raw farm sales) to roughly 15% (with processing included), per BEA/Gardner Institute figures. GDP figures sourced to an advocacy page (Utah Rivers Council), not a state or federal dataset.

Case File

Golf courses: the one major user with no reporting requirement at all

Two bills, two consecutive years, neither became law — one would have required disclosure, the other would have studied the data and then classified it.

Tap or click a card below to flip it and see the source.

118Golf courses statewideSource →

Utah AGRC's statewide GIS golf-course layer (services1.arcgis.com, "GolfCourses" feature service) — course polygon count, not an official water-reporting list. A commercial directory (golfcourses.us) separately lists ~155, likely including driving ranges/par-3s.

~23,600 ac-ftTotal golf water use, 2022Source →

Salt Lake Tribune / Great Salt Lake Collaborative, "Here's how much water golf courses use across Utah," April 2023. Voluntary reporting — about 25% of Utah courses did not share data, so this is a partial figure.

1,085 ac-ftHighest single reported user: Copper Club, MagnaSource →

Same Tribune 2023 dataset. Kennecott/Rio Tinto has said the figure is inflated by a shared industrial well serving both the course and nearby operations — included here with that caveat attached, not as a clean course-only number.

0Statutory reporting requirements todaySource →

Utah State Legislature bill history: H.B. 188 (2023) and S.B. 195 (2024) both died without becoming law — see the timeline below. No other bill currently imposes a golf-specific water-reporting duty.

Golf courses by county (118 statewide) — click to expand

Salt Lake — 26
Washington — 14
Utah — 13
Davis — 11
Weber — 9
Summit — 9
Wasatch — 6
Cache — 4
Tooele — 4
Box Elder — 2
Emery — 2
Sanpete — 2
Millard — 2
Morgan — 2
Rich — 1
Beaver — 1
Juab — 1
Carbon — 1
Iron — 1
Garfield — 1
Sevier — 1
Uintah — 1
Grand — 1
Duchesne — 1
San Juan — 1
Kane — 1

Count is course polygons in Utah AGRC's statewide GIS golf-course layer (services1.arcgis.com, AGRC/UGRC "GolfCourses" feature service), not a state list built for water-reporting purposes — none exists. A separate commercial directory (golfcourses.us) lists ~155 Utah entries, likely counting driving ranges and executive/par-3 courses the GIS polygon layer omits; treat both as approximations, not an official state count.

If the reporting gap held at the same rate, statewide golf water use would be higher than the reported figure — illustrative math, not a published estimate: the Tribune's ~23,600 ac-ft figure reflects the roughly 75% of Utah golf courses that voluntarily reported in 2022. If the ~25% that didn't report used water at the same average rate as those that did, statewide use would scale to roughly 23,600 ÷ 0.75 ≈ 31,500 ac-ft/yr — about 7,900 ac-ft/yr, or roughly a third more, than the reported total. This is a simple extrapolation assuming non-reporting courses aren't systematically different (smaller, municipal, less irrigated, etc.) from reporting ones — that assumption isn't verified, so this should run as a caveated "if" figure, not a stated fact.

H.B. 188 (2023) — would have required disclosure. Died in committee, no floor vote.

JAN. 25, 2023 — FIRST HEARING

Rep. Douglas Welton presents the bill. Ryan Peterson (Golf Alliance for Utah) and Randy Elliot (Davis County Commissioner) testify in opposition — no one testifies in favor. Immediately after, the committee votes 8-1-5 to adjourn the entire meeting before voting on the bill. Rep. Gay Lynn Bennion casts the lone "no."

FEB. 10, 2023 — SECOND HEARING

A hold motion is made before any substitute is even considered. Rep. Keven Stratton then moves a stronger substitute — 2028 mandatory public reporting, a $30M efficiency-grant program, a new Golf Advisory Board — which passes unanimously, 11-0-3. The committee then votes 9-2-3 to hold that same, unanimously-adopted substitute. Only Bennion and Rep. Doug Owens vote against holding it. An attempt to adjourn the whole meeting early fails 5-6-3.

MAR. 3, 2023 — ENACTING CLAUSE STRUCK

The House strikes the bill's enacting clause — a procedural mechanism that ends a bill without a recorded vote on its merits — with no floor vote ever taken and no recorded opposition beyond the two witnesses from the first hearing.

Speaker Mike Schultz was absent for both hearings, in full. Rep. Casey Snider was present and personally sponsored two other water bills earlier in the Feb. 10 hearing, then was recorded absent for the portion of the hearing covering the golf bill. Chair Walt Brooks voted to hold the bill both times.

How each bill ended

flowchart TD
    A["H.B. 188 filed, Jan. 2023
would require golf water disclosure"] --> B["Jan. 25 hearing
opposition testifies, no proponents"]
    B --> C["Committee votes 8-1-5
to adjourn before a vote"]
    C --> D["Feb. 10 hearing
substitute passes 11-0-3"]
    D --> E["Same substitute held 9-2-3
in the same meeting"]
    E --> F["Mar. 3, 2023
enacting clause struck — no law"]
    G["S.B. 195 filed, 2024
would study golf water, then classify it under GRAMA"] --> H["Passes Senate"]
    H --> I["No House sponsor found"]
    I --> J["Dies without a House vote — no law"]
    F -.same underlying question.-> G

S.B. 195 (2024) — the opposite bill. Would have studied the water, then classified the results.

Sponsored by Sen. Daniel McCay — the same senator who had been H.B. 188's Senate sponsor a year earlier — S.B. 195 directed USU's Institute of Land, Air and Water to study golf course water consumption statewide, but classified the data collected from both public and private courses as protected under GRAMA, unavailable to the public. It passed the Senate but never secured a House sponsor, and died without a House vote. The Utah Transparency Project reportedly gave it a "closed door" designation.

Two consecutive sessions, same underlying question, two different outcomes — neither became law: the bill that would have made golf water use public ended in committee before a floor vote; the bill that would have studied it and then classified the results ended for lack of a House sponsor. As of today, the 2022 Salt Lake Tribune dataset — voluntary, ~25% incomplete — remains the only public figure.

HB 188 SB 195 GRAMA Water Transparency

Golf courses aren't the only category exempt from public water disclosure. Utah's 8 licensed medical cannabis cultivators — a state-capped, indoor/greenhouse industry in Box Elder, Davis, Sanpete, Sevier, Tooele, Utah, and Weber counties — have no public water-use figures either. The Utah Department of Agriculture and Food states plainly, on its own cultivator page, that it is "limited on what information can be disclosed about these cultivation facilities." The likely scale here is small next to agriculture, golf, or data centers — these are capped, mostly indoor operations, not open-field irrigation — but the pattern is the same one running through this whole piece: another licensed, regulated water user with no public number attached to it at all.

Case File

Residential water: mandatory meters are coming, decades after the fact

The group getting "slow the flow" messaging is also the group whose actual usage the state has, until recently, been least able to verify.

~260,000Secondary (outdoor irrigation) connections statewideSource →

Utah Division of Water Resources / secondary metering program figures, via reporting on Utah Code §73-10-34 (HB 242/2022, SB 251/2023).

85%Share unmetered as of 2022Source →

Billed by lot size or flat allotment, not actual use, prior to the metering mandate. Same state program reporting as above.

Jan. 1, 2030Deadline for universal secondary meteringSource →

Utah Code §73-10-34, set by HB 242 (2022) and SB 251 (2023) — backed by $250M in ARPA grants plus a later $190M round (KSL, 2022).

Utah runs dual water systems in many cities: treated, metered primary (culinary) water for indoor use, and untreated, historically unmetered secondary water for outdoor irrigation — a legacy of former farmland converted to subdivisions. HB 242 (2022) and SB 251 (2023) require secondary meters statewide by 2030, backed by $250M in ARPA grants plus a later $190M round. Where meters have gone in, usage has dropped 20–40% simply from people seeing real numbers for the first time — Weber Basin Water Conservancy District is credited with first proving this out.

This is a genuine, funded, in-progress fix — not a dead bill. It's included here for contrast: residential secondary use is heading toward full metering by law, on a fixed deadline, while golf courses (a comparable outdoor-irrigation-heavy user) have no equivalent requirement at all.

Case File

Data centers: the one category with a real, if narrow, disclosure law

This is the piece a sector percentage hides. A small number of individual facilities account for enormous, unevenly disclosed volumes.

Disclosed annual water use, named Utah data centers

SOURCE: PUBLIC UTILITY RECORDS VIA SALT LAKE TRIBUNE / GRIST REPORTING, 12-MONTH PERIODS 2024–2025

Novva (West Jordan)

3M gal

DataBank Granite Point

7.7M gal

eBay (South Jordan)

19.5M gal

Aligned – West Jordan

47.4M gal

Aligned – West Valley

80M gal

NSA Bluffdale

126M gal

Bars scaled to this group's own range (3M–126M gal). Novva says two-thirds of its total was landscaping, not cooling. These are reported withdrawals/consumption for a specific ~12-month period — not permanent operating limits or forecasts.

Named, but not in city water records: Meta (Eagle Mountain). Meta's own reporting put the Eagle Mountain campus at about 35 million gallons in 2024. Its monthly water use is kept confidential under a 2018 agreement with Eagle Mountain, so the only public figure is the yearly total Meta itself reports. Adding Meta, the seven named facilities total about 318 million gallons a year, or about 980 acre-feet (Hive calculation).

No public water figure found in the reporting reviewed for: QTS and Google in Eagle Mountain (approved, under construction at the time of the report); Joule Capital Partners in Millard County (holds rights to more than 10,000 acre-feet of groundwater); and operating sites such as Flexential and FiberNet. "Not found" means it did not appear in the public sources reviewed, not that no figure exists.
Source: Salt Lake Tribune / Great Salt Lake Collaborative, "Can Utah become a data center hub without draining its water supply?" Jan. 14, 2026.

What's actually required now: H.B. 76 (2026, Koford/Sandall), effective July 1, 2026, requires a new data center larger than 10,000 sq ft expecting to withdraw at least 75 acre-feet/year to submit preconstruction water information — estimated withdrawals, water source, discharge plans, conservation efforts — to the Division of Water Rights, then report actual annual withdrawals once operating. The Division says it will publish each covered facility's name and reported withdrawal, not just a statewide total, though some business details may still qualify for GRAMA protection if a facility shows disclosure would cause competitive harm. An earlier committee draft briefly broadened the bill to "large industrial facilities" generally before the final version reverted to data centers specifically; the penalty for non-reporting was also cut from an initial $10,000/day to $100/day in the final text.

The law has a grandfathering gap. Per the Division of Water Rights, large data centers already operating — or that had begun construction — before July 1, 2026 are exempt from the new reporting program. That means the public will likely keep relying on utility records and individual records requests for some existing facilities, not the new state disclosure system. As enacted, the law also does not cover agriculture, golf courses, or industry generally.

16.6B gal/yrStratos gas turbines — power-generation water onlySource →

Utah Clean Energy, "Estimated Emissions and Water Consumption from the Proposed Stratos Data Center," 2026 — equivalently ~50,000 acre-feet/year under a combined-cycle configuration.

847B gal/yrAll of Utah, every use, combinedSource →

Utah Foundation, 2023 statewide estimate, cited via Snopes, June 2026.

separate & unknownThe data center's own cooling waterSource →

Not included in the 16.6B figure at all — confirmed directly from Utah Clean Energy's source page, which covers power-generation water only.

The gap that's the real story, corrected: Stratos's developers told reporters their plans are "still under design" and described the campus as similar to "a large office complex." Utah Clean Energy's 16.6-billion-gallon estimate (equivalently, ~50,000 acre-feet/year under a combined-cycle turbine configuration) covers only the water needed to generate power for the site — it explicitly excludes the data center's own cooling water, confirmed directly from Utah Clean Energy's source page. That means the true total, if built as a combined-cycle facility, is 16.6 billion gallons plus a second, still-undisclosed cooling figure on top — not 16.6 billion as a ceiling. Neither number is locked down; the "office complex" framing addresses neither.

For scale and context, not as a causal claim: Utah's Brigham City nuclear reprocessing facility is projected to use about 620 million gallons/year — three orders of magnitude less than Stratos's power-generation water alone. Solar and wind generation use close to none. These are separate infrastructure decisions happening in parallel, not a zero-sum tradeoff with each other; the contrast is in water intensity and disclosure, not displacement.

New water approved during the basin freeze. Gov. Cox's Proclamation 2022-01 (November 2022) closed the Great Salt Lake basin to most new water rights, with exceptions for uses that return the water, applications with a plan to offset water used, and small amounts. In the two years after, about 300 applications asked for more than 230,000 acre-feet. The state approved about 2,517 acre-feet of new rights, mostly for irrigation and stock water. The largest approval, Keller Cattle Corp.'s 556.7 acre-feet near Promontory (approved July 2024), is about 22% of that total (Hive calculation: 556.7 ÷ 2,517).
Source: Salt Lake Tribune / Great Salt Lake Collaborative, "Amid a freeze, Utah granted millions of gallons of new water rights in the Great Salt Lake basin," Feb. 10, 2025 (Division of Water Rights data through Oct. 29, 2024).

Looking Ahead

Where this is headed

Utah doesn't have its own multi-year data-center water trend yet — the industry is too new here. The closest comparable trajectory is Phoenix, a similarly arid Western market already several years into the same build-out.

Benchmark	Figure	Source
Phoenix-area data center cooling water, current → projected	385M gal/yr → 3.7B gal/yr (+870%)	Ceres analysis
Five-state (AZ/CO/NV/NM/UT) data center water use by 2035	up to 7B gal/yr	Western Resource Advocates, July 2025
Single hyperscale facility (50–100+ MW), peak	1–5M gal/day	Environmental & Energy Study Institute

Cooling method changes these numbers by an order of magnitude — a closed-loop or dry-cooled facility and an evaporative-cooled one aren't the same category, even at similar size. Any comparison across named facilities should note which method applies where it's known, and flag it as unknown where it isn't.

Sources

KSL.com, "82 percent of Utah water goes to farmers — here's why," 2015.
Utah Foundation, "Hay! One Crop is Utah's Biggest Water Consumer," 2015; and 2023 statewide water-use estimate (847B gal/yr), cited via Snopes, June 2026.
Great Salt Lake Strike Team / Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, Data and Insights Summary reporting, via Utah Division of Water Resources.
Utah Rivers Council, "Are We Running Out of Water?" (utahrivers.org) and utahwaterfacts.com — indoor household use (3–4%) and alfalfa/hay's 0.2%-of-GDP figure. Advocacy source; figures cross-checked against BEA/Gardner Institute data where available.
Salt Lake Tribune / Great Salt Lake Collaborative, "Here's how much water golf courses use across Utah," April 2023 — statewide golf course water data (voluntary, ~25% of courses not reporting).
Utah State Legislature, H.B. 188 "Golf Related Water Modifications" (2023), bill text, substitute comparison, and official House Natural Resources, Agriculture, and Environment Committee minutes, Jan. 25 and Feb. 10, 2023.
Deseret News, "Bill requiring Utah golf courses to publish water use stalls," Feb. 10, 2023; "How much water do golf courses use? Bill asks for declarations," Jan. 28, 2023.
KPCW, "Proposed bill would make water use at Utah golf courses protected information," Feb. 13, 2024 — S.B. 195 (2024, McCay).
Utah State Legislature / Utah Division of Water Resources, secondary water metering program — Utah Code §73-10-34 (HB 242/2022, SB 251/2023); USU Extension case study, Weber Basin Water Conservancy District.
KSL.com, "Utah board approves 'historic' $190M in secondary water meter grants," 2022.
Grist / Salt Lake Tribune / Great Salt Lake Collaborative, "Can Utah become a data center hub without draining its water supply?," Jan. 2026 — named-facility water figures (Novva, DataBank, Aligned, NSA Bluffdale) from public utility records.
Utah State Legislature, H.B. 76 "Data Center Water Transparency Amendments" (2026), bill text and substitute comparisons (Koford/Sandall).
Utah Clean Energy, "Estimated Emissions and Water Consumption from the Proposed Stratos Data Center," 2026 — power-generation water estimate, explicitly excluding data center cooling water.
Snopes, "Will Utah data center use 16B gallons of water and span almost 3 Manhattans? What to know," June 7, 2026.
Ceres / qz.com, "AI data center water use collides with drought in the West," 2026.
Western Resource Advocates, five-state data center water projection, July 2025.
Environmental and Energy Study Institute, hyperscale facility water-use range.
Utah Department of Agriculture and Food, "Medical Cannabis Cultivators" (ag.utah.gov) — licensed cultivator list, county locations, and the department's own statement that it is limited in what it can disclose about these facilities.
Utah AGRC/UGRC "GolfCourses" GIS feature service (services1.arcgis.com) — statewide golf course count and county breakdown.
Salt Lake Tribune / Great Salt Lake Collaborative, "Alfalfa and hay use more than half of Utah's water," Nov. 24, 2022 — 68%-of-diversions figure, total statewide diversions (5.1M ac-ft/yr).
Fox 13 Investigates, "Utah's top cash crop is consuming most of our water" — Laub family (Beryl, Iron County) alfalfa operation, ~10,000 tons/yr, overseas export share.
AgReserves / Deseret Ranches / Deseret Land and Livestock — general landholding figures (~200,000 acres, Rich County) via Wikipedia and Salt Lake Tribune, Oct. 2020; no alfalfa-specific acreage or water-use figures located. Largest-landowner figures (Robinson/Freed and Holding families) via a secondary aggregator site, not independently verified against a primary source — treat as unconfirmed.
Utah Division of Water Rights, owner-name search results for "Laub" (waterrights.utah.gov) — individual water-right certificates and application numbers, read as a pasted text capture; area codes cross-checked against the Division's own Area 71 (Escalante Valley), Area 75 (Parowan Valley), and Area 81 (Washington County) policy pages.