At the foot of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Andy Rice Is pulllng a kid out of a fence. She bleats plalntlvely for her mother as he frees her.

Sheep and goats graze rotationally on the 400-acre ranch, where Rice Is playing the long game, building soil and conserving water for the productive future of Boulder Creek Canyon. For Rice, the hay and livestock that come off the ranch today are secondary to the ecological restoration that wlll Increase the land’s value as farming evolves In the coming decades.

As Rice talks, he moves constantly around the ranch. A metal gate creaks as he pens neighbors’ cattle who funneled through the canyon of Boulder Creek as they came down off the range.

“We’re an Isolated community, a small community, with relatively small chunks of land,” Rice said. “The real product here Is range.” Boulder, Utah (pop. 246) Is surrounded by the Dixie National Forest to the north and the national monument to the south. Sheer sandstone buttes like Sugar Loaf rise high above the valley. The canyons, forests, bare rocks and mountains make up an achingly beautiful working landscape.

The sandy soil of the ranch Is delicate and easily depleted, but Rice wants to restore this soil to Its best working condition. “We’re a soil farm,” he said. “In 20 years, we will be able to look at the value of the soil and the land from a cropping perspective, and we will be able to take more harvest and bring more livestock, but It depends on healthy soils.”

To jumpstart soil rejuvenation, the ranch used federal conservation funding and technical assistance from the USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). Boulder Creek Canyon rested the land for several years before starting rotational grazing of sheep and goats.

“We have these partnerships with the federal and state agencies that cover some of that cost, and It’s the only thing that makes the work we’re doing possible,” Rice said. “You can only afford to lose so much money.”

The ranch also benefits from the knowledge of USDA technical assistance professionals, who learn from working with farmers and ranchers with similar goals around the country. “There’s a chain of thousands of people that are doing the same experiments and having successes and failures that they can share with us to speed up our tlmellne, and that’s Just as Important as the flnanclal piece,” Rice said.

In the parched West, water Is Just as Important as soil for bulldlng a healthy, future ranch. Boulder Creek Canyon Ranch has cut Its water use In half by modernizing Irrigation equipment through Utah’s Agricultural Water Optimization Program, funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL). The program paid for half of a new center pivot sprinkler, updated nozzles and a remote management system. The ranch also Installed soil moisture sensors.

 Healthy soils help ranchers conserve water as wel l. “For every 1 percent Increase I can make In organic matter, I can take another 10 units of water out of my picture,” Rice said.

On the ranch, Boulder Creek enters a community diversion through a large pipe, so the water saved on the property gets used by other farmers and community members Instead of entering the Escalante River. For Rice, conserving water allows them to plan for a future of potentially limited resources. “We’re making a long-term plan to do more with less; he said.

It’s long work, but Rice can see progress In the dirt In his hands and under his boots. “Where we’ve been successful, the soil ls aggregated and full of organic matter and has earthworms In every handful,” he said. “All we had five years ago was a handful of hot sand with stickers, and no life In It at all.” 

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, commonly called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Biden in 2021. The law will invest billions of dollars in federal funding into rural infrastructure, disaster assistance, high-speed internet, and more.