R6 begins master plan for Central Utah Agripark

NEPHI—The R6 Regional Council has purchased 930 acres about 4 miles northwest of Nephi and is beginning to prepare a master plan for the long-anticipated Central Utah Agri-park.

The goal of the project, says Shaun Kjar, the director, is to “help legacy agriculture,” or put more simply to “save the family farm.”

An agri-park is an industrial park that specializes in processing, storing and shipping agricultural products. In fact, Kjar says, the main requirement for leasing land and setting up a business in the park will be that the business be agriculture-related.

There are several, generally much larger, agriculture parks around the country, such the 12,000-acre TexAmericas Center in New Boston, Texas (near Texarkana), which offers 36 miles of railroad tracks; and the 6,800-acre Great Plains Industrial Park in Parsons, Kansas, 115 miles from Tulsa, Okla., which has “warehousing, rail access and water sources specifically for agricultural products…”   

“We have great producers” in Central Utah, Kjar says. “But there’s a missing link, a lack of processors and distributors.”

That means Central Utah farmers and ranchers have to ship their products out-of-state to get them processed and packaged for sale to the ultimate consumer. Those shipping and processing costs cut deeply into the producers’ profits.

In 2022, Jenna Draper, then the economic development director for what was formerly called the Six County Association of Governments, wanted to narrow down to a single project that would make a big difference to the Central Utah economy.

Darin Bushman, a Piute County commissioner, “did some traveling to check things out,” Kjar recalls. That was followed by focus groups in each county where commissioners and mayors were asked for input.

“Everything pointed to agriculture,” Kjar says.

Each of the six counties contributed to a fund, which ultimately totaled $1 million. A feasibility study was conducted. It found that there was a significant volume of products in the six counties and beyond, especially beef from cattle and wool from sheep, that required further processing. That led to selection of an agri-park as the key economic development project for the region.

During the 2023 and 2024 sessions, the Utah Legislature passed special appropriations totaling $9 million for the purchase of land, water and initial establishment of the park. 

In August 2023, Kjar, who lives in Ephraim and who was formerly a Snow College administrator and the Ephraim city manager, was appointed as director.

Kjar and R6 officials started looking for a site. They settled on Juab County, one of the counties in the R6 region, because it had a freeway (I-15) and railroad (Union Pacific) and was also the site of a major Rocky Mountain Power substation.

But the search wasn’t easy. Between 2023 and 2025, the R6 group “very seriously considered” many sites in Juab County but ran into obstacles every time, ranging from insufficient access to water to being too far away from a population center that could provide employees for such a park. The group even started looking in other R6 counties, including Sanpete.

During this same timeframe, the Utah Inland Port Authority (UIPA), a public-private organization established by the Utah Legislature that originally focused on vacant land in or around Salt Lake City, started moving into rural parts of the state.

The UIPA began identifying project areas—defined geographic areas around the state that UIPA and local officials believed would be good locations for major business growth. In some cases, the organization designated “zones” for specific projects within project arears, In Juab County, UIPA designated 35,000 acres as the Juab Valley Project Area, and 2,391acres within the project area as the “Agri-Park Zone.” The Central Utah Agri-park is in the Agri-Park Zone.

Approved businesses that locate in a project area can float bonds to finance their projects. Some of property tax dollars generated in the project area can be used to make payments on the bonds.

The bond payments become a form a government subsidization of economic development. But the theory is that state and local government don’t lose out because the business development increases property values substantially. Ultimately the higher values translate into more property tax revenue.

As R6 was searching for land and winning approval from UIPA, something that had happened on the national stage trickled down to Juab County and provided an answer to the search for a site.

In 2019, Congress passed the John D. Dingell (Dingell) Act (named for a Michigan congressman who had died that year after being the longest-serving member of Congress in U.S. history).

The act designated 1.3 million acres of additional national park, national monument and national recreation land nationwide, including 760,000 acres in Utah, primarily in the San Rafael Swell. But 116,000 of those Utah acres were school trust lands set aside to provide financial support to education.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which owned most of the land in the San Rafael Swell, wanted to prevent development on the new wilderness and recreation lands. Yet the whole point of having trust lands is to sell them to parties who want to develop them.

So in November 2024, the Utah State and Institutional Trust Lands Administration (TLA) traded the trust lands in the San Rafael Swell for BLM parcels of comparable size and value around the state. One of the parcels was the 960 acres in Juab County.

Kjar and other R6 officials checked out the site. “It checked all the boxes,” Kjar said. The soils were suitable for large buildings. There were no wetlands. There were two large power lines already running through the property. The site is close to the railroad line. And water, natural gas and potentially sewer would be available by extending lines out of Nephi or from the adjacent unincorporated land.

“This site saved us half the cost of some other sites we were looking at,” Kjar says.

In December 2024, R6 purchased the Juab County site from TLA for $5.6 million.

Work on a master plan is underway. The key consulting firms are Sunrise Engineering of Fillmore, which did initial feasibility study, and Jones & Demille Engineering of Richfield, which prepared the Juab County road plan and has been tasked with developing a road plan for the agri-park.

R6 has hired WSP Global, which specializes in industrial park design, and which has offices in Salt Lake County, to come up with a land-use plan.

Horrocks Engineering, a longstanding Utah firm with offices in Utah and Salt Lake counties, is coming on to design railroad spurs into the park.

R6 has already applied to have the park annexed to Nephi City. “We want to bring the utilities in first and get them at a level that will accommodate businesses we hope will (ultimately) be there,” Kjar says.

Within 18 months to two years, he expects to begin leasing land to the first occupants. “We aren’t going to build the buildings, but we’ll be making the sites shovel-ready,” he says.

Some of the first tenants could be food processing companies, possibly companies processing some of the fruit grown in the Santaquin area. “That could come pretty quickly,” Kjar says.

Another needed business, he says, is a “superwash facility” for cleaning wool sheared from sheep. “The main facility now is in South Carolina.”

The Central Utah Agri-park is a very large and very long-term project, Kjar explains. “I don’t think we’ll be at full build-out in 10 years.”

But in 100 years? Kjar foresees the park bringing in millions of dollars of processing business from other places, rather than Central Utah shipping those dollars out of state. If so, he says, “This will be a place where agriculture is still happening.”