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Spring Planting

Photographed in Sanpete County, Utah.

 

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Newly plowed alfalfa hay fields lay below snow-covered mountains in central Utah. We estimated over two-thousand Mule Deer foraging in these fields over a thirty-mile span of US-89 which runs through the Sanpete valley.

 

Since settlement(1850s), Sanpete County's economy has been based on agriculture. In its first few decades it served as Utah's granary. Sheep dominated the local economy from the 1880s through the 1920s, and the county played a prominent part in world markets for a time. Turkeys, grown casually as a farmyard animal, became a cooperative, integrated industry in response to the 1930s Great Depression. Today they rule the roost in Sanpete, which ranks among the top ten turkey-producing counties in the country. Sanpete's location at Utah's geographical heart masks its isolation. Much interstate and recreational traffic bypasses it. The small, scattered towns with their long and interesting rivalries have never allowed the development of a dominant county economic center.

 

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Uploaded on March 31, 2009
Taken on March 30, 2009