PLAINFIELD — Long Lake has lost its shoreline. Dock after dock dead-ends in the weeds. This small lake in the Central Sands of Wisconsin looks more like an unmowed lawn with a pond in the middle than a place where families used to water ski and fish. The lake used to be up to 12 feet deep. Now it is closer to 3 feet.
“Long Lake was once a trophy bass lake. So when we moved here, in the first two years, my boys were catching bass like crazy,” said Brian Wolf, who owns a cabin on Long Lake. “It was like catching fish in a barrel as the water declined.”
In 2006, the lake dried up completely and all the fish, including 3-foot-long northern pikes, died in the mud. Homeowners like Wolf lost their lake and more than half their property values.
Across central Wisconsin, in a region known as the Central Sands, residents have watched water levels in lakes and small streams drop for years.
Twenty miles north of Long Lake, a six-mile-long coldwater trout stream, the Little Plover River, just landed on a list of America’s 10 most endangered rivers because of its declining flow.
In a state with about 15,000 lakes and more than a quadrillion gallons of groundwater, it is hard to believe that water could ever be in short supply. Experts say, however, that the burgeoning number of so-called high-capacity wells is drawing down some ground and surface water, including the Little Plover River and Long Lake.
In the early 1950s, there were fewer than 100 high-capacity wells in the Central Sands, according to the state Department of Natural Resources. Today there are more than 3,000 — 40 percent of the state’s total — in the six-county area.
Officials at DNR say that legally, they cannot block new wells based on the impacts from existing wells. And lawmakers want to keep it that way.
In June, as part of the new two-year budget, the Legislature took away citizens’ ability to challenge well permits issued by the DNR even when evidence suggests the new well would contribute, along with other neighboring wells, to drawing down nearby surface waters.
The law, which will go into effect on July 1, 2014, was sponsored by state Rep. Daniel LeMahieu, R-Cascade. He passed along requests for comment to the office of Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester.
“The motion keeps the environmental impacts the same but protects the DNR by taking the judicial branch out of the permitting process,” Kit Beyer, communications director for the speaker’s office, said in an email.
Water advocates saw the budget amendment as a sign the Legislature does not want to acknowledge a serious problem.
“Any fifth-grader can tell you that if you put too many straws in the water it’ll be gone,” said Bob Clarke, a board member of the nonprofit stewardship group, Friends of the Central Sands. “For our legislators to ignore that is just wrong.”
Experts say the implications of overpumping are on display across the state.
In the Madison area, the deep aquifer is down almost 60 feet. Waukesha’s withdrawals have pushed the deep aquifer down 600 feet. Green Bay had to tap Lake Michigan after depleting its groundwater in the 1950s.
High-capacity well expansion in Central Wisconsin
In the Central Sands, scientists say that a rapid expansion of irrigated agriculture may be largely to blame — setting the stage for a water fight between farmers and those who fear for the region’s lakes, rivers and wetlands.
“We were all raised with the sense that this is Lake Superior underneath us, and it’s not,” said Justin Isherwood, a farmer with about a dozen high capacity wells for irrigating his 1,400 acres of potatoes and other vegetables in Portage County.
Tensions have sprung up over how to allocate a finite water resource to many legitimate uses: municipal water supplies, industries, irrigation, private wells, lakes and streams.
To some, it comes down to this: Who needs the water more — the potato plants or the trout?
For those, like Isherwood, who love both, finding a solution involves hard questions.
“What do we as a group of farmers think we owe nature?” asked Isherwood, who grew up farming in the region before irrigation was common.
Surface, groundwater tightly linked
In the Central Sands, there is no rock layer above the groundwater, and water is so close to the surface that the lakes are basically holes where groundwater emerges. Draw down the aquifer through pumping — for agricultural, industrial or municipal use — and there’s less to feed the surface waters.
“Every gallon of water that gets pulled out of the ground is a gallon that’s not going to the stream or lake it’s supposed to,” said George Kraft, a hydrogeologist with University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and UW-Extension.
The state DNR evaluates and can put restrictions on well permits based on potential adverse environmental impacts. But its lawyers say the agency cannot take into account the cumulative effect of other owners’ wells.
To farmers who rely on irrigation to grow their crops in the Central Sands, Wisconsin’s current policy is fair. Why should one farmer’s well permit be denied because of his neighbors’ wells?
Duane Maatz, head of the Wisconsin Potato and Vegetable Growers Association, an Antigo-based group representing the interests of 140 growers, believes there is no water shortage.
“Our groundwater is not decreasing,” said Maatz, citing data the growers’ association collects from wells on farms showing water levels higher than last spring before the drought. “If the flows are different, there has to be another reason.”
But in many arid Western states, water withdrawals have long been tightly regulated. And some of Wisconsin’s neighboring states have begun to address groundwater depletion. Minnesota, for example, is developing groundwater management areas to address cumulative effects of pumping in heavily irrigated regions.
Dairy proposal draws lawsuit
Several groups and individuals, including the Friends of the Central Sands, have sued DNR, alleging it failed to protect Pleasant Lake and other nearby lakes and streams when it issued two well permits to Richfield Dairy, a proposed 4,550-head operation in Adams County. Richfield, a proposed confined animal feeding operation, or CAFO, is permitted to use up to 72 million gallons of water a year.
State Sen. Mark Miller, D-Monona, said he believes LeMahieu’s amendment was aimed at protecting Richfield Dairy from legal challenges. Late in the budget process, however, the language was changed so that the new law will go into effect in July 2014 and have no impact on the Richfield Dairy case.
“What the Legislature is saying is that we don’t care how high-cap wells are affecting our surface waters,” said Carl Sinderbrand, the attorney for the lead plaintiff, Pleasant Lake Management District, a governmental entity that maintains the lake. “It impairs our ability to protect the state’s waters for the public. I would call it a weakening of the constitutional protections for the state’s waters.”
Through a provision known as the Public Trust Doctrine, the Wisconsin Constitution gives the state the responsibility to protect all of the state’s waters as a public good.
Two years ago, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the DNR had the authority and duty to consider evidence that a high-capacity well might harm any of the state’s waters. This broadened the protections to all waters, not just the exceptional resources like trout streams, that were protected by the state groundwater law enacted in 2004, said Eric Ebersberger, the DNR water use section chief.
But in that case, the court did not directly address the issue of cumulative impacts, Ebersberger said, so the DNR evaluates each proposed well individually unless they are all located on the same property. He added that it is unusual that the impact from a single well would be considered significant enough to deny a permit.
“Let’s say your well will draw down two inches; each of your five neighbors’ will too. I don’t have the authority to deny your well because your neighbors’ wells are already having an adverse impact,” Ebersberger said. “Admittedly, we can see how that’s an unsatisfactory approach if you are a member of a lake association.”
In the Richfield Dairy case, Kraft, the hydrogeologist, said his models show that the CAFO’s wells could have a 1- to 2-inch impact on the lake. Consultants for the Richfield Dairy came to a similar estimate.
“They argue that with the lake already down two feet, what’s another inch?” Kraft said. “It’s the next inch and the next inch and the next inch and pretty soon you’ll have a dry lake. It’s futile to manage groundwater one well at a time.”
The science behind the problem
Kraft has linked the loss of lake and stream water to groundwater withdrawal by comparing data from areas with many high-capacity wells to those without a lot of pumping.
Historically, water levels in all the lakes fluctuated similarly — a little lower during drought, higher in wet years, according to Kraft, who has studied the groundwater of central Wisconsin for nearly three decades. But as withdrawals increased, water levels in nearby lakes began a steady decline while lakes farther away did not, he said.
“Irrigation stresses are sufficient to explain the previously rare or never before observed low-water conditions that have prevailed since 2000 in the Wisconsin Central Sands,” Kraft wrote in a scientific paper for the journal Groundwater in 2012.
Opponents dispute Kraft’s conclusions, suggesting that climate change impacts, such as less rainfall, or other factors could be causing the lakes to shrink.
“We are concerned that a rush to manage a complex issue without a fully developed, scientific approach will do more harm than good,” said Maatz from the growers’ association.
Kraft said if climate change were responsible, lakes surrounded by fewer wells would show the same patterns — but they don’t. He added that data from the DNR show that Wisconsin has generally gotten wetter in recent decades.
Ken Bradbury, a hydrogeologist at the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey, said Kraft’s research is basically sound and that his model works well to draw attention to the general problems of overpumping in the region. But Bradbury believes a more sophisticated tool is needed. He is working with the DNR to build a model of the Little Plover River that will help sort out the complex factors leading to drawdowns.
Farmers in a tight spot
The central Wisconsin landscape is dominated by big, flat fields. On many, a long irrigation pivot arm runs from a central well, crawling in a big arc and spraying down onto neat rows of potatoes and corn. Wisconsin has almost 400,000 irrigated acres, about half of them here in the six counties that comprise the Central Sands — Adams, Portage, Marquette, Wood, Waushara, and Waupaca.
Growing potatoes is not easy. Farmers battle blight and beetles to preserve the crop, and without irrigation, yields in the porous Central Sands would drop sharply.
Isherwood, who writes about the importance of water to the region, said growers in his community see themselves as stewards, so it is hard for them to accept that they might be causing the water losses.
“We view ourselves as good guys, we’re raising the food, we’re getting dirty doing it, we listen to cowboy songs on the radio, how can we be to blame for anything?” Isherwood said. “It’s not easy confronting that we just might be the bull in the china shop.”
The Dairy Business Association, which promotes the interests of Wisconsin dairy farmers, and the potato and vegetable growers’ group both oppose cumulative impact based regulations.
Maatz said Wisconsin growers already take water efficiency seriously — out of economic necessity. Pivot irrigation systems use state-of-the-art technology that can apply precisely the amount of water the plants can use, he said.
“We’re using less and less water and yet we’re still blamed for the problems,” Maatz said. “Everybody wants to manage or regulate us out of business.”
Water advocates say they are not looking to stop irrigation, only to find a fairer way to share the region’s water resources.
“We are not against farms, we just want to do the math,” said Clarke, the Pleasant Lake homeowner who runs Friends of the Central Sands. “We enjoy eating. We enjoy potatoes. We enjoy milk. But there’s got to be a balance.”
Isherwood said farmers are talking about water issues, but he believes more research is needed to convince them the problems are real.
Homes without water now under water
Irrigation is a key part of the state’s $59 billion agricultural industry, but lakes pull their own economic weight. Lakes draw tourism and recreation. Property taxes on lake homes support local governments.
“I’m amazed that people aren’t more upset about this from a private property rights standpoint,” said Helen Sarakinos, a water policy expert with the advocacy group River Alliance of Wisconsin. “People are losing their lakes and this (LeMahieu’s) motion said, ‘Too bad.’ ”
Wolf, a psychologist from Kenosha, bought a cabin on three wooded acres along Long Lake in 2005, just a year before it dried up, killing all of the fish. In a 2007 letter, the local assessor told property owners around Long Lake and several other small lakes in the area that their property values had plummeted by 60 percent because of the lower water levels.
“Everybody should be able to use these lakes. I should be able to put a boat in off my dock and paddle around my lake,” Wolf said. “I should not lose my lake at the expense of these other things.”
Potential solutions
What should Wisconsin do about its water problems?
Scott Froehlke, who heads the Central Sands Water Action Coalition, believes creating a regional groundwater management district could give local stakeholders — farmers, water advocates, scientists and local officials — the ability to work with the DNR to negotiate acceptable pumping levels and procedures for how to scale back if a lake or stream is losing water.
A similar plan to coordinate groundwater management in at-risk areas was proposed in 2010 by Sen. Miller and former Democratic Rep. Spencer Black of Madison, but the bill stalled when it faced resistance from Republicans, rural Democrats and the agricultural industry.
Maatz said his group also opposes regional groundwater management districts in part because “farmers would be outnumbered.”
But Maatz does support the development of the groundwater model for the Little Plover River. The project, run by the DNR with federal and state experts including Bradbury, would create a detailed model of the watershed, including irrigation and municipal pumping, drainage patterns, land use and rainfall and recharge changes.
“To me, the way the state should be making decisions in sensitive parts of the state is to use these models and to make an informed decision,” Bradbury said. “Looking at these wells one at a time, you’d never see the cumulative impacts.”
Ebersberger said the model could provide evidence that the DNR could use to ask well owners to scale back pumping — something the agency has never done. But he said the DNR could only do that if it could trace a significant impact back to a single well, not the cumulative effect of many wells. Such a request likely would be challenged in court, Ebersberger added.
It will be at least a year before that model, developed at a cost of $200,000, will be ready to provide any insights, Bradbury said.
While the state waits for the study, more and more wells are going in. Ebersberger said that well applications have increased dramatically, a response to last summer’s drought and the high price of corn. Well applications grew from 276 applications in 2011 to 416 in 2012, and they continue to be high this year, DNR figures show.
Kraft is frustrated with the calls to wait until more research is done before pushing for stronger policies.
“We’ll have more Little Plovers and more Long Lakes,” Kraft said. “And then we’ll have the political pressure to do something.”
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It occurred to me that farmers and fishermen aren’t the only two groups affected by this water controversy; homeowners who spend muco-bucks on lake front property also have been adversely impacted.
History repeats itself.
In the late 1980s, I served as the token environmental rep on a state Legislative Advisory Committee on Water Quantity, chaired by Senator Chuck Chvala, where these same issues were debated at length.
At that time, high-capacity wells and deep gravel quarries (which require constant groundwater pumping to keep dry) were sucking water out of Wisconsin lakes and streams, and causing severe hardships for waterfront property owners and wildlife. (Sound familiar?)
This advisory committee included aggressive lobbyists for the dairy, potato, cranberry, and quarry industries, as well as the Farm Bureau. They used the same lame arguments then as now, and after a year of many frustrating meetings, they succeeded in blocking the committee from achieving much of anything.
When it became clear that the Ag Lobby had too much political power and there was no hope of getting anything done in the Legislature, the committee was dismantled.
Whenever big money is involved, government services and regulations seem to get twisted.
The original thrust of the committee creators had been to give the DNR the authority to monitor, regulate and conserve groundwater (and linked surface water) quantities in order to maintain balanced, sustainable water supplies for a sensible mix of users.
That would have been a rational expectation, if our society’s leaders were rational, responsible, caring adults.
But in the end, I think our committee only managed to modestly improve the DNR’s data collection authority regarding high-cap wells. That was all. (In the 1980s, the DNR had shockingly incomplete data on water use in Wisconsin.)
It’s discouraging to read now that the SAME issues and arguments are resurfacing as if this is all new, unexplored territory. Nobody seems to realize this has all happened before (… perhaps many times and in many different venues?)
When humans are involved, the day of reckoning seems to get pushed-off to the future whenever possible. Why tackle difficult problems when they can avoid facing-up to them and simply leave them for the next generation to suffer or fix?
Wisconsin desperately needs reasonable water quantity regulations, but as always, selfish people will continually fight against rule making. And because selfishness is a strong motivator, it gives them political power.
They don’t care who they hurt in the future, so long as their own prosperity is ensured for their own lifetimes.
It’s a sickening basic flaw in human nature.
It is amazing how people seem to make this “Farming vs. Everything Else.” People need water to drink. People need food to eat. Farming feeds people and uses water, yet it seems that farming is being made the scapegoat for poor water management in other areas. There are a couple of pertinent facts — not just in Wisconsin but in the country: There is much less farmland and many more people than there were five or six decades ago.
Those people are still eating and still need farmers (a far fewer number than in the 1950s and 1960s) to grow that food.
Perhaps other water uses are the issue, such as use on washing down houses, non-food producing gardens, public building green spaces and decorative growth, golf courses, schools, industrial, etc.
What is the deal with throwing all the blame at people who – and yes, for a profit and a job – produce the very thing that keeps people alive, people who continue to use much more water than they did in the past — even as their numbers grow – on things that have no bearing on the essential water and food that they need?
Tom – I agree there are several types of water use that could be contributing to some of the groundwater drawdowns in the Central Sands region, but the data shows that the proliferation of high-capacity wells is the major new factor causing harm, and most of those wells are for agriculture.
People aren’t pointing fingers at ag users for no reason!
What seems to be missing is a willingness for the powerful agricultural sector to “own up” to its significant role and be willing to submit to long-term monitoring and regulation along with all other users.
What’s wrong with sitting down to hold rational discussions about the relative needs and merits of all the different water users and developing a smart conservation plan that will minimize the pain for each sector?
If nothing is done, we’ll continue to see a crazy, destructive “free-for-all” out there, which hurts every sector’s long term interests.
As you point out, the human population continues to grow, so conflicts will just get worse if we don’t establish basic, fair minded, reasonable water regulations for all major users. (If residential users are shown to equal ag users in creating problems, then I agree we need residential regulation also.)
If you can propose reasonable or effective solutions to the groundwater drawdowns, I’m sure they’d get serious consideration.
Nobody wants to kill farming!
I would love to see a professional, peer-reviewed, and fully independent analysis of the total annual economic value of the Natural Resource Damages caused by lake and stream drawdowns in the Central Sands region … totaling the lost property values, lost taxation base for local governments, stranded business investments, lost tourism economies, lost jobs, wasted government infrastructure investments (for stranded public boat landings, docks, waterfront parks, bridges, beaches, government boats, and other taxpayer investments made useless.)
A good Natural Resources Economist could also add in the dollar value per year of all the lost individual recreation opportunities for local residents and tourists. (UW-Madison has professors who are national experts in this field of study.)
The lost human food and fur value of the disappearing aquatic plants, fish, turtles, frogs, ducks, geese, fur-bearers and other wild game could also be included. Low-income people are undoubtedly losing important free sources of subsistence foods and other resources in these dried-up public waterways.
And finally, I’m sure an expert could estimate the economic cost of the emotional stress, anger, anxiety, sleeplessness and depression that the drawdowns are causing among affected people in the Central Sands. (Damages could include significant lost work, reduced productivity, increased medical costs, relationship conflicts, suicides, hastened natural deaths, and even increased delinquency and crime.) Such widespread devastation of lakes and streams is bound to create serious social consequences for more than a few local residents suffering from major economic losses and a greatly reduced quality of life.
Who wouldn’t be profoundly upset if they used their life savings to buy their lifelong dream of a house on a beautiful Wisconsin lake, only to lose the lake and 60% of their investment a year later! And what if they NEED to sell the house now and can’t? (I would be catatonic if all that happened to me!)
If a full report totaled all this damage for the entire Central Sands Region and translated it into DOLLARS, it would clearly show a huge number.
Perhaps then, farmers would finally have to face up to the true costs of disappearing lakes and streams, and honestly ask themselves whether a relatively small group of high-cap well operators have a right to cause this much economic and social damage to the people around them.
But we shouldn’t even NEED such an expensive and time-consuming study, when everyone should already get the gist of what it would show. The “Big Number” that would result should be obvious, even to farmers. It’s common sense.
There has to be a better answer to this groundwater conflict than just waiting around … doing nothing while hundreds of new high-cap wells are built, more waterways dry up, and more lives are ruined.
It’s ridiculous to call center pivot irrigation systems “efficient” when you constantly see them in use during the day.
Omri raises an important point. Farmers claim to be as water-efficient as possible, but has anyone verified that this is true? Are they ALL efficient, or only some of them?
Key question: Is any independent agency tracking the amount of water used per farmer, per acre, per type of crop … or are water usage rates still only SELF-REPORTED by farmers using an honor system?
In other words, are there mechanized, tamper-proof meters permanently recording and transmitting pumping rates and total daily hours of operation on every well? Are there frequent checks by government inspectors to make sure the meters are operating properly and that gathered data is accurate? I’m guessing not, but would love to know. If inspectors exist, are their visits random and unannounced, or do they give advance notice and allow farmers time to “tidy up”?)
From reading the state statute, it appears the DNR is forced to simply TRUST the total withdrawal numbers reported by farmers once each year.
ACTUAL groundwater pumping rates may be substantially higher, and not properly factored into computer models used to explain well impacts. The models could be skewed badly due to GIGO data (Garbage In = Garbage Out.)
Also, is there truly no other farming method, or additional control, these farmers could use to lower their water usage? If there are, how costly are they? Are they cost prohibitive? By how much? Relative to what? In whose opinion?
And how was all that land used before irrigation? It was never a desert. Did it produce a different type of crop that still had significant economic and social value? Even if it was used solely for forest products, I suspect it was still economically worthwhile land. Tree roots could easily reach such a high water table.
Currently, the water is FREE and apparently UNLIMITED for these farmers (due to lack of independent monitoring), so the only cost of irrigation is for energy and equipment. So farmers have an economic motivation to conserve energy and manage their equipment carefully … but they have ZERO economic or legal motivation to conserve water (beyond the cost of pumping it).
If farmers were charged as much as the nearest residential users of municipal water supplies (minus filtration/disinfection costs), what would these farmers pay and how would they farm differently? (Here in Green Bay, water is expensive for residential users, so many of us are careful about the quantity we use.)
What if Wisconsin placed a tiny surcharge of $ 0.0001 (a 100th of a penny) or a little more on every gallon of water extracted by every well in the state, applied equally to all users? The state could use such user fees to fund greatly improved tracking and analysis of water use, as well as greatly improved inspections and enforcement. It could also fund research into new cost-effective water conservation methods and more drought-tolerant crops. It might even be used to “buy-out” and retire excessive users.
It could be a self-supporting program, with no taxpayer subsidy of any kind required.
If a farmer used 100,000 gallons per day for roughly 3 months, such a surcharge would equal $900 per year. If a farmer used 1,000,000 gallons per day, it would be $9,000 per year. If a farmer had many wells and used a LOT more water, the cost might finally be enough to motivate them to conserve water.
The surcharge could start at 1,000th of a penny per gallon for a few years, to give farmers time to adapt. Then it could rise to a 100th of a penny at year 3, then even a 10th of penny after 5 years or so, to make sure the water is properly valued and conserved.
I’m pretty sure that an economic incentive tied to consumption rates would greatly increase water conservation by all users, so long as well extraction rates are accurately tracked. (Municipal well users would still pay more per gallon than farmers because of added treatment costs.)
The surcharge could start phasing-in right away (or after a few years of legislative bickering). A few years later, the research data funded by the fee could be used to develop a fair and transparent management plan allowing a maximum of agricultural, industrial and residential uses while still maintaining Wisconsin’s natural lakes, streams and wetlands at sustainable levels.
Perhaps the state could create a “cap and trade” system for irrigation, where farmers could openly buy and sell irrigation credits … though first I’d like to see a thorough economic study of the long term evolution of such a system. I couldn’t support it if credits could gradually be horded by just a few wealthy ag industries who would buy up and permanently “own” all irrigation rights in Wisconsin. If strict limits could be placed on hording and some credits could be kept reserved for new farmers, then it might be OK.
(A version of this system has been used here on the Fox River for years, for distributing the “right” to discharge a regulated total amount of polluted wastewater into the river and bay of Green Bay. The idea bothers me, but it seems to work given that many people’s brains are hardwired to economic values only.)
High capacity pumpers are engaged in theft of a public resource just as anyone who would capture whitetails for a private fenced in hunting reserve and then sell them to the highest bidder for a canned hunt. I feel for these farmers but the handwriting is on the wall, in neon, that way too much water is being pumped and the results are detrimental to every single water interest there is unless one’s water interest is to have no water. It may be a traditional family business to grow potatoes in sand but that no less makes it a foolish one and about the only advice I can offer farmers is that they need to start adjusting their expectations and that they may have leave for better parts of the country to conduct their business. I now live in Indiana and for all the goofy things they do down here they have gotten one thing right–if a farmer, or anyone, pumps so much water that it dries up their neighbor’s wells you pay for a new well and if that does not solve the problem you buy the property at a premium. Last year in White and Benton counties, rural homes lost their wells due to overpumping and the DNR was on the farmers like white on rice to make those affected whole immediately. It certainly has caused farmers pause how and when they water if they suddenly might be responsible for daily water deliveries, new wells, etc. And as well it should. Congratulations, Wisconsin, you now get to live with those you elected and they’ve decided ‘little people’ are a nuisance and undeserving of even having the most basic of life needs, water.