For Ranchers and Farmers in Rural Utah, Prosperity Is a Pipe Dream

Doneen Griffin recently started work at South Central Telephone for $6.50 an hour. It’s not much, but she’s happy for it.

As small as the wage is, it is still a far cry better than the waitress job she held at Ruby’s Inn, a 100-mile round-trip commute from her home in Escalante, Utah. And it helps pay the bills.

Doneen Griffin, the mother of six children, and her husband, Quinn, work five jobs between them to make ends meet. They dabble in real estate, they raise a few cows and they do janitorial work at the local bank. Quinn also teaches at a local Mormon seminary.

The Griffins are typical of many families living in rural Utah, where there is no such thing as a 40-hour workweek and things like health insurance, paid vacation and sick leave are dreams for all but a lucky handful.

And there is little prospect that things will get a whole lot better. Economic prosperity in rural Utah is a pipe dream.

“Unfortunately, the economic boom enjoyed by the Wasatch Front just hasn’t happened here,” said Garfield County Commissioner Louise Liston. “The ranchers are in a death struggle with foreign beef, everyone is carrying massive debt and looking to sell their land, and we are all looking for some way to survive.”

Liston is speaking from experience. Her family sold off lucrative federal grazing permits to pay off ranch debts--she and her husband now raise ostriches. Others in rural Utah are looking at raising domestic elk, and still others are considering turning their cattle operations into dude ranches.

While these rural Utahans dream of making it rich, the reality--one they openly acknowledge--is that they hope to make enough money to hang on to their family farms and preserve the unique rural heritage.

They look jealously at the explosive economic growth along the populous 100-mile Wasatch Front, which includes Provo, Salt Lake City and Ogden. There, an entry-level job flipping burgers at a fast-food restaurant brings a wage that compares favorably with that being made by many in rural areas with college degrees.

Moreover, they are frustrated that unemployment in the city is hovering around 3% while the number of jobless rural residents is double or triple that.

As if this weren’t enough, rural pessimism is rooted not so much in a belief that things won’t get better, but in a gut-felt fear that they could get worse.

Gov. Mike Leavitt, himself with close family ties to rural Utah, acknowledges that nearly one in 10 rural residents has not witnessed any of the robust economic times that have dominated the last decade.

San Juan County, in Utah’s southeast corner, is among the poorest counties in the nation, at least partly because of its large Navajo population. One of every 10 residents of adjacent Garfield County is without a job.

And virtually all rural counties are seeing a migration of young adults leaving to make their fortunes in the city.

Leavitt has promised to make the “economic resettlement of rural Utah” a top priority in his second term. “Resettling has a nice pioneering concept to it,” he said.

It is a catchy phrase, but a lot of community leaders in rural Utah aren’t sure what it means.

For example, when Leavitt speaks of preserving Utah’s rapidly disappearing farmland, rural Utahans cringe at the thought that government might try to regulate what they can do with their private property.

“If someone comes along offering $8,000 an acre for pasture lands that once sold for $800 an acre, they believe that no one--not the mayor of a small town, not the county commission, not the governor--should have the power to stop that,” Leavitt said.

“Rural Utahans feel passionately about private property rights.”

But that passion threatens the very soul of rural Utah. Farmland is being sold off in unprecedented amounts to urbanites who want a cabin or a retirement home, often without regard to a community’s pioneer heritage.

The urban settlers rarely bring jobs or money to an area and strain government services to boot.

In popular areas like Moab and St. George, the newcomers are close to outnumbering native residents and shifting the political balance of power.

The real irony is that rural Utah’s economics are being affected by forces much larger than property rights and the multiple use of natural resources. The farmers and ranchers in Panguitch and Loa are the victims of global forces, Leavitt said.

“I believe there are global economic forces at work here, macro-economic forces that are changing the economics everywhere, and rural Utah is no exception,” Leavitt said.

The key is how local communities adapt to those changes.

Among the factors affecting the economies of rural Utah:

* The North American Free Trade Agreement and other trade pacts have resulted in an influx of cheap beef from South America and Australia, sending U.S. beef prices plunging.

* The deregulation of electrical utilities could have disastrous consequences for small coal-fired power plants that may not be able to compete with cheaper hydroelectric power plants.

* Large numbers of aging baby boomers are fleeing urban and suburban lifestyles for the West. Some are telecommuting, which does little for local economies. Others are simply retiring.

* The shift to a service-based economy has left rural areas unprepared to meet the demand of tourists, retirees and urban refugees who have flooded rural communities. Where longtime residents have been accustomed to making do with the bare minimum of government services, the newcomers demand better roads, airports and police and fire protection.

* National attitudes toward industries like mining, oil drilling, ranching and logging have become increasingly hostile over the last two decades. Issues like protection of endangered species, preservation of scenic areas and clean air and water now have priority over harvesting natural resources.

Leavitt insists it is up to the local communities to decide how they want to look 10 and 20 years from now, and he has pledged the support of state planners to help communities forge new economic strategies to help them survive.

Some counties have embraced the planning efforts, but some remain adamant that change will not affect them.

“I can understand why they do not want change to occur. What they have is a delightful way to live,” Leavitt said. “But change is coming, and they cannot ignore that it is happening. My objective is to help them shape it while they have the opportunity to shape it.”