- Welcome, everyone, to "Wednesday Nite @ the Lab."
I'm Tom Zinnen.
I work here at the UW Madison Biotechnology Center.
I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension,
and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers,
Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association,
and the UW Madison Science Alliance,
thanks again for coming to "Wednesday Nite @ the Lab".
We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.
Tonight, it's my great pleasure to introduce to
you George Kraft.
He's a professor at UW Stevens Point and a state specialist
with UW Extension Cooperative Extension.
He was born in Chicago, went to high school in Palatine,
Illinois, and graduated from high school in Cleveland, Ohio.
He got his undergraduate degree and his master's degree
at Stevens Point.
He came here to UW Madison
after working at the Department of Natural Resources
for several years to get his PhD.
And then he was able to get a professor position
back up at UW Stevens Point.
So, it's great to have somebody with three different connections
to the UW System here.
He's going to be talking about
groundwater in the central sands.
Quite germane issue.
For George it's been going on for only a decade or so.
It's been in the news a lot the last week or two.
I think it's going to be a great combination
of science and public policy.
Something we do not too poorly here,
which I really appreciate George coming down from Point to give
us a talk on his research over the last 10 to 15 years.
So please join me in welcoming George Kraft
to "Wednesday Nite @ the Lab."
[applause]
- Thank you, everybody.
It's wonderful to be here.
I've been looking forward to this since Tom first called me.
And I have this very warm feeling, very safe feeling.
I think if I collapsed here on stage and Tom said,
"Is there a doctor in the house?"
there'd be 30 hands go up.
Unfortunately, there'd be like six geologists
and a bunch of biochemists.
And finally, an M.D. or a D. O. would come up and go,
"Nah, I just do livers. I don't do heart attacks."
[laughter]
So groundwater has been making a lot of news,
not just here, but nationally, internationally.
I kept track this week of what was turning up in the newspaper
and the news.
So Bloomberg news had a report in it on its opinion page that
India needs to get its groundwater house in or there's
overdraft going on in places there.
Too much water being used
and the water is going to heck there.
Arsenic killing people because they're pumping too much
for agriculture over there.
Our host, Tom, sent out a note
where he mentioned the Ogallala Aquifer
and what's going on in the western part
of the state aquifer covering multiple parts of the state.
And after years and years and years and years of warnings
that this was going to happen,
there's places in Kansas now and nearby states
where irrigated farmers are giving up the ghost.
They've drained this sucker.
They drained it way more quickly than they needed to.
If you read the old book "Cadillac Desert"--
Anybody here?
They talk about already in the 1980s, they figure,
"Eh, we're gonna drain this sucker
and the government's going to bail us out someday."
Well, it's draining and nobody's bailing them out.
Waukesha, you know the reason for the Great Lakes diversion is
because we're drawing too much water down
in the deep sandstone aquifer over there.
And Saudi Arabia, that's been just a few months back
rather than just the other day or this week.
But Saudi Arabia, they did this experiment
with irrigated agriculture in the desert
drawing water up from this aquifer.
That was, you know, thousands or maybe tens of thousands of years
old, depleting it just in the blink of an eye,
comparatively by geologic time.
And now they're shutting this down.
So, you know, we got a lot of issues
when it comes to groundwater.
How many kind of groundwater at least aficionados here?
[laughter] Oh, come on.
Some of you are being--
Yeah. Okay.
Being shy here.
But, okay, what's this groundwater stuff?
Groundwater is the water underground in the pores between
sand grains or the cracks in the rock where it's saturated.
I think you all have a feeling that you know
that soil contains water.
But it's not saturated.
But pretty much anywhere we go in the Earth--
If we go deep enough, we'll hit the water table,
which is the zone below which
all the spaces in the geologic media is saturated with water.
And this is the water that we can pump from wells.
It's the water that also flows and supplies water
to streams in this state.
I'll say it more than once here.
It fills our lakes and such here too.
So here's a simple groundwater system.
And, you know, we can complicate this sort of thing quite a bit.
But the basics are all the same.
We have water coming in from precipitation,
and we have it flowing through the subsurface
and discharging to streams.
So, in this case here, if this were Wisconsin,
we're getting about 32 inches of rain a year.
It lands on the surface here.
An inch or two might directly run off into a stream
and leave a watershed that way.
But the majority of it goes into the soil.
Plants use quite a bit of.
About 22 inches a year are sent back up into the atmosphere,
and if you've been doing the math here,
that leaves about six inches, eight inches, 10 inches,
depending where we are in the state,
that seeps through the soil and becomes part of the groundwater,
this blue zone over here.
Now, if groundwater just stayed still, we'd be in trouble.
We'd be up to our eyeballs in it after a few years.
But the fact is that groundwater moves.
So, groundwater, once it's in an aquifer,
it's sole purpose in life is to get the heck our of the aquifer
and discharge to a water body, usually a stream but also
some of our large lakes.
Some Madison lakes, for instance,
are groundwater discharge areas.
Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, Winnebago as well.
So, here's our simple groundwater flow system here.
Now, audience participation question: if we had a depression
in the topography here, a hole of sorts, I'm thinking maybe
20, 40, 60 acres inside that goes below the water table,
what would we call this thing?
- [inaudible]
- A pond or a lake. Okay?
And the point of this here is that we want to show that are
streams are indeed oftentimes almost exclusively creatures of
groundwater, but so are most of our lakes.
And as the groundwater does, so do our lakes and so do our
streams.
And so when we're in Wisconsin
with a very nice reporter in a cold trout stream
from the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism,
or we see many, many of the small lakes,
well, mid and large lakes as well,
in central Wisconsin, northern Wisconsin,
we gotta be thinking groundwater.
Groundwater is keeping these things flowing.
Groundwater is keeping these things filled.
It's a single resource.
So let's talk about, now, not just the natural system,
but what happens when we pump groundwater.
And what I'm going to say about pumping isn't to say that we
should never pump groundwater.
But what I'm saying is that there are tradeoffs,
and there can come a point, like any resource,
where we're using too much of it,
and we have consequences that we don't want.
And so there's two big wheels that control groundwater levels,
I guess as well as lake levels and as well as stream flows.
The one big wheel here is precipitation or weather.
Wet years we get more groundwater recharge.
We got higher levels.
We got more water in streams.
Dryer years we go the other way.
The other big wheel is groundwater pumping,
and what groundwater pumping does,
it takes the natural signal of ups and downs
and it brings it lower. Okay?
So that's what groundwater pumping does.
It takes the natural signal of ups and downs and makes it lower.
So, if we take our little cartoon here and now we put in
a pumping well here, it says high capacity well,
but it really means it can be any kind of a well.
The first that you'll probably notice is that this water here
that was going to the east stream is getting intercepted by
the high capacity well and taken someplace well.
And so that water is being deprived of the stream.
Now, if this well happens to be really close to this stream
and we're pumping that well really hard,
we can actually induce flow out of the stream
and into that high capacity well and dry it directly.
The other thing that you'll probably see here
is note that the water table
is substantially lower in the vicinity of the well
due to the pumping that's going on here.
And, you know, a little appreciated fact is that when we
put a new well in and we pump the thing, it could take years,
even if you're only using it a part of the year and all that,
before the incremental effects of pumping
come to a new equilibrium,
cause a new equilibrium with groundwater levels.
Could be a number of years before that happens.
Kind of a more subtle point here,
you can see that there was a groundwater divide here
where we didn't have pumping
where a bunch of water go to the west
and a bunch of water goes to the east here.
And the pumping of the high capacity well here
is drawing water from the west watershed, if you will.
We're actually shifting he groundwater divide over.
And so a lot of people have a thought that while we're pumping
groundwater, we only have to worry about the
streams or lakes that are down slope or down gradient of it,
but the fact is that we can also have a broad area impact
from a high capacity well after it goes.
So, subtle point and often is under appreciated.
So this-- You know, I'm big, being an Extension guy,
on what kind of messages can you pretty much take to the bank and
it's going to be right 99% of the time Groundwater pumping
always lowers water level somewhere,
and it diverts discharge from somewhere.
Usually it's from streams, but, again,
bigger lakes like that too.
So let's do just a little overview of the pumping
situation in Wisconsin.
We have some 7,500 high capacity wells in the state.
The red dots here are ones that have been put in since the year 2000.
So you can see that these are rapidly expanding,
the numbers of these.
Most of the wells in the state are used for irrigation
purposes.
And it's also where virtually all the growth
of new wells is for irrigation.
You know, it's funny.
We don't think about ourselves as an irrigated state,
but we're rapidly going that direction.
Central sands, then, is this area here.
I would say the main body
of the central sands covers
parts or all of six counties.
And we know what's going on there pretty well.
We also know, because we have a lot of excellent hydrologists,
we also know pretty well what's going on in Dane County and I
suspect also in the southeastern part of the state.
But there's all these places in Wisconsin
where we have lots of high capacity wells
that have been developed or are going in right now.
We really don't have a clue.
We haven't taken a look to see what the impacts are.
And we should.
You know, for many, many, many years getting
a high capacity well permit, or approvals they're called,
was easy as filling in the paperwork,
paying a very modest fee. [claps]
Wham-bam, you got the approval to put in a high capacity well.
And that approval was given whether or not you're going to
dry somebody's well up, whether you're going to dry a lake up,
or whether you're going to dry a stream up.
It was an automatic.
And it's only been in the very last few years where we've been
starting to take a look at the impacts of wells,
particularly multiple wells,
before these approvals get issued.
And the state legislature seems very busy trying to overturn
that modest amount of protection right now,
and we'll talk about that later.
So, let's move along to the central sands.
The centrals sands, oh, were about, from north to south here,
about 80 miles, and west to east, oh, maybe 50 miles.
Something like that.
You can see it's a region that's very rich in surface waters.
There's some 600 miles of stream.
Many of them are trout streams.
And, oh, at least a hundred lakes that are 25 acres or more.
Then when you get to smaller, kettle hole lakes and wetlands
and that sort of thing, there's a whole bunch more.
What makes the central sands the central sands is that the
glacial geology here is typically 100 to maybe 300 feet
of sandy material over some less permeable bedrock.
So the aquifer for the region is mostly held in the sand deposit.
And it's something that's very easy to pump and to get high
volumes of water from.
The part of the hydrology that drives the lakes and streams
and everything else is the groundwater part.
The underground part here.
So, in the slide on the right-hand side here,
these are the elevations of the groundwater table here.
So, all over the central sands we have precipitation coming in,
and it causes, just like we saw in that cartoon,
it causes a rise in the water table, kind of in the middle.
And we got a flow going to the west,
and we got flow going to the east.
Again, this water, its sole purpose,
get the heck out of the aquifer by the easiest means possible to
a stream and leave the system.
Along the way, many times it hits a depression,
by golly we have a lake.
And at the headwaters of these things,
we have some phenomenal cold water ecosystems,
brook trout, you know?
The magic thing here is, well,
brown trout and the ecology that keeps all those things alive.
So, the central sands view from the air.
In the middle, we have the main irrigated region here.
It shows up quite apparent.
To the west here, we have a mixture of dry land,
woodland kind of agriculture, but some irrigated stuff
sprinkled in.
And to the east we have dry land agriculture, forest,
and a mixture of irrigated land moving out there as well.
Okay, so I'm working on telling the story
as kind of a chronological narrative.
Let me see how I do here.
So, 1930s already we have irrigation starting
in the central sands,
but this is mostly from surface waters or from pits.
You know?
The way I picture this, and I talked to some farmer friends
that say, "Yep, that's about what it's like."
These are guys, because it's mostly guys,
finding old engines from a Model T or something like that,
hooking up to a pump and distributing water over fields
that were pretty close to streams,
or pits that were shallow enough to groundwater you could pump
out of there.
This proliferated through the '30s and '40s,
and by that time there was a lot of conflict because farmers were
drying up streams by directly pumping water out of them.
And people were kind of getting ticked off
that their stream is dry, fish are dead, and that kind of thing.
The Attorney General's office worked aggressively
at that time.
It was a violation of the public trust doctrine for
water management in Wisconsin.
You can't do that.
So they instituted a permitting process.
They kicked, you know, a bunch of people out
of pumping from the streams.
And then we get into the 1950s here.
The surface water irrigation almost entirely disappeared,
and there were a couple of new technological developments here.
First in well drilling, and secondly in, you know,
these machines that can irrigate large acreages by spinning
around in a circle. You know?
We learned how to fabricate aluminum in World War II,
and this is one post-war use of it.
So there's a bunch of wells going in.
And then in '57-'59, lots of debate and discussion on water
and groundwater pumping and that sort of thing.
And by the way, for those of you that are historian kind of
folks, when you go back and look at how well these issues were
discussed, both in the legislature and in the Milwaukee
Journal of the day, this was covered very closely.
It's the wonderful kind of journalism that, you know,
we don't have the resources to see anymore, I'm afraid.
So, okay, '57 to '59 we have things coming to a head.
And here's two bookends, I think,
for the groundwater discussion.
One of them, you know, advocating a go slow approach.
We don't know what's going on here.
Let's take it slow.
These were the conservationists of the day that were
suggesting-- They weren't asking for anything that
onerous.
They said, hey, let's issue permits and keep an eye on
things, measuring stream flows and that sort of thing.
If we have unintended consequences,
we'll slow this thing down.
And then this was the other side of the discussion here.
Actually, the people on this Ag Water Conservation Committee,
a lot of them are still around today, although much,
much aged here.
But we still see these same arguments.
Wait a second, no reasonable person cares about this.
This isn't an issue.
There's all kinds of water here.
What are you talking about?
We just don't have the information.
We need another study or something, right?
And we still hear echoes of this today.
This is like the cigarette debate.
Remember 1950 already, we knew cigarettes caused cancer,
and it took us decades before we reached that tipping point
where we did something about it.
Point being here that we got to 1959, go to the legislature,
ask them for a groundwater management bill,
which we could have had at that time.
They were convinced, "No, we don't want to go in this direction."
Okay.
And then we didn't do anything with groundwater-- I got to
check my math here.
But getting on 45-50 years.
So, you know, in that time, 1950,
we had two high capacity wells.
1960 we were getting close to 100.
Well, now some scientific things are starting to happen in
parallel here.
So the Little Plover River is said to be the most studied
stream in the country.
And I don't know that for a fact,
but I've added to that pile of research.
My good friend Ken Bradbury is completing another study on that
where we've been re plowing some old ground
and adding to some things.
But this was a guy named Ed Weeks did this,
released this study in 1965.
This is a famous USGS kind of a guy.
It must have been when he was still cutting his teeth.
And he showed the groundwater/surface water
connections here.
He mapped groundwater flow in the area.
He measured the stream as it picked up groundwater flow along
its route.
He did an experiment where he put a high capacity well right
next to the stream, turned it on,
and intentionally dried up the stream.
And then he also did calculations that said, well,
if irrigation gets to this point,
we're going to be missing this much stream flow.
If it gets to this point, we'll be missing this much more kind
of stream flow.
So he did this kind of calculation.
Are there any hydrologists here that saw the famous film that
was made of this research?
Yeah, I figured. [laughter]
So there was a film made of this back in the day
that all budding hydrologists have had to see-- from my era--
to make your education complete.
Anyway, so this was some of the good science
that was done in the evolution.
Another canary in the coal mine maybe that we ignored So we get
to 1970, and we're getting close to 500 wells by this time,
which, if you remember, is about a fivefold increase.
Ed Weeks was at it again with some other accomplices here.
But he started studying the broader picture
in the central sands.
The wells that were going in and what he was expecting to see
in terms of impacts on surface water.
So, he actually measured a different locations.
When the wells would go on, the stream flows went down.
He measured water levels going down,
and then he started making some predictions.
You know, when the landscape has X percent of the--
X percent in irrigated land use,
we'll expect to see water levels down by Y amount
and this much less water in streams.
The studies, the work that he did here could have served as
the basis for a groundwater management plan.
I mean, instead of doing this stuff with computers,
they were doing it with slide rules and pencils and graph
paper.
But he put out a perfectly good strategy back here in 1971 and
tools for managing groundwater way back then.
So-- Oh, this was Weeks' warning here.
Basically, be careful.
You know?
Keep this thing managed and maybe you can have the best of
both worlds.
This is east of Plainfield,
and this was part of the area
that Ed Weeks was studying here.
So there's this series of lakes and wetlands
that go east of Plainfield.
So the freeway actually is on the far left side here.
This would be maybe five miles east of there.
And let me take a close look here.
I can see a few of the lakes here.
The upper left here, you can see there's a Plainfield Lake,
and if you can make out this writing,
and maybe you can't here, but that's a 10-foot contour.
It's probably 12 feet at the maximum.
Here is the famous Long Lake here, which, you know,
had a reported depth by DNR of 14 feet here.
And you can see we have some shallow lakes here,
and probably things that were wetlands part of the time,
lakes another time.
A deep lake here called Lake Huron
that might have been 40 or 50 feet deep.
We're going to come back to this guy in a little bit.
But here's the Little Plover, and now here's those Plainfield
lakes here.
We went from the 500 high capacity wells to, 1980,
we've cracked a thousand.
1990, we got 1400.
2000, we're up over 1700.
And then, come middle of 2000s here, and we have problems.
I don't know if you can see from here, but, you know,
it looks like this thing has been hallowed out.
That the landscape has been partially de watered here.
When I mean de watered,
I mean we're lowering the water table here.
Let's take a close-up look at it.
So here we have that Plainfield Lake, which was, what,
a dozen or so feet deep in that USGS map.
You know, it's completely toast.
It's turned into a wetland.
This year, in Long Lake, it's very low.
And this a lake that was a trophy bass lake,
and my Assembly person says, "Huh,
I used to water ski there when I was a kid."
And you can see the, you know, things that were shallow lakes
have gone dry, wetlands have gone dry,
other lakes have turned to wetlands,
and the deep lakes have just gotten
a whole bunch more extra shoreline.
So, here's some pictures of that.
You know, point being, by the mid-2000s here, you know,
we had this slow motion accident here where,
bam, we hit the wall
and now it's undeniable that we have issues here.
So this is that Long Lake Oasis.
This was all taken by a guy who bought his place there like
in 2004, and in the next two, three years he had a dry lake.
2000-- This is 2005 or 2006.
So it's turned into wetland.
The fish are toast by this time.
Sure as heck, you can't water ski there, right?
[laughter]
This is about 2008 here.
The thing has turned into a meadow.
I was there the other day,
and it's the highest I've seen it in a dozen years there.
But, you know, I'm thinking there's about this much water
in there right now.
I don't-- You know, you could barely float a boat in there
besides a canoe.
But I don't think we're going to have any fish there
any time too soon.
It's just a very wet year.
We had 40 inches of rain last year.
Little Plover, you know, this stream that was well
investigated, not only by Weeks but also by fisheries,
biologists, in terms of why it was such a productive trout
fishery here.
It went dry every year from 2005 to 2009,
and mostly flows what's below the public rights flow.
Think about that as a healthy flow most of the time
since then.
This was Pickerel Lake in Portage County here.
This is standing on the boat landing with
now it's about 80 feet from the water.
There's a-- Each of these lakes has a story,
and the reason I'm showing one after another is that there's a
sense among some of the stakeholder groups that it's the
Little Plover River and it's the Long Lake,
we fix those two things, we're all good.
No.
This is dozens of water bodies.
Okay?
You know, there's the story here is that there's a camp for
indigent children over here, and they're losing their waterfront.
The lake fish kills more often than it did.
Wolf Lake, you know, this is where Portage County has a park.
On a typical Saturday or Sunday, there would be families,
you know, 100 people there.
150 people at any one time using the beach area.
Water level has fallen so much now that, you know,
there's no sandy material.
You go off the edge, and you're down in the books.
Nobody brings their kid down there anymore.
So we've lost that.
It hasn't been usable for 14 years,
according to the parks director.
A dock to nowhere here on Pine Lake near Hancock.
Another creek that's gone dry.
You get the idea.
You know, this is a lot of water bodies that are involved here.
So, this is kind of where I come into the picture.
Actually, it's just before the disasters.
I'm an Extension hydrologist, and some people in lake groups,
you know, we're worried about all these wells going in
and our water levels going down.
What do you think?
I was kind of on the fence for a little bit.
You know?
But then we did have the catastrophic dry ups,
and my team and I did a number of studies on this.
Peer reviewed, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff.
To which added to the pile are Dr. Bradbury's recent report
that should be coming out here in a month or two.
And, you know, a graduate student's work where she
reviewed all the data for the last umpteenth century
on the area and published that as well.
So, you know, among scientists,
this is quite well accepted stuff.
So, you know, what does a scientist ask himself
when confronted like this?
Well, maybe this is normal, you know?
And so what do you do?
Do you have stream flow records?
Do you have water level records for these impacted water bodies?
What do we have that we can look at?
Actually, I was thinking there's probably people here that have
careers in, I don't know, biochemistry and gene jockey
stuff and all that stuff.
Hydrologists-- And you got all kind of cool toys.
Hydrologists have two things.
We have-- We have statistics and conservation of mass,
you know?
That's our two big things.
Okay, we do some fancy things with satellites and the like,
but, basically, we rely on conservation of mass and
statistics to kind of do our hydrology,
particularly forensic hydrology.
So, you know, we went looking for some records here.
These things are pretty sparse, but there's enough of them here.
So here's a Plover monitoring well here.
And you go, wow, okay.
This is really something here.
It's in a heavily irrigated area.
And look what it's been doing now for a few decades.
Nobody was paying attention to the record here.
It was up on USGS site.
And one of the four, five, six long-term monitoring wells we
have in the sands, we don't have a tremendously long record.
But, holy cow, this turned out to be valuable.
So, wow, okay.
But fortunately for us, because stakeholders say, "Ah,
Little Plover dries up all the time."
Okay.
The USGS was monitoring the Little Plover River continuously
from 1959 to 1986, which included some of the driest
years of the previous century here.
And you can see the water level is bouncing up and down.
Don't worry about the exact numbers here.
But you can see this says 10.
10 cubic feet per second was about the average here.
And you look at what we had in those more recent times here
when we're having these dry spells.
And it would plot below the--
Hey, this is the exact meaning of off the charts, right?
[laughter]
It plots below the minimum of this chart here
for a good chunk of the time.
So it's okay.
You look at this Plover data, a couple other water levels,
this Little Plover stuff as well, and, you know,
it's looking something normal isn't going on right here.
So, you know, okay.
And there's assertions.
We're in a record drought.
Hmm, how about that?
Then we started looking at precipitation records
and looking at how precipitation used to be
and what it is in the current time here.
So, we've had very dry times in central Wisconsin,
and maybe more of Wisconsin, from about 1946 to either the
mid-'60s, mid-'70s, however you want to cut it.
During this whole time, compared to the average,
we were getting two inches a year blow average, on average,
versus the current time right now.
In the last couple of decades we've been getting inch,
inch-and-a-half more precipitation than average here.
So, you know, these dry spells that we have in the more modern
area compared to the past here, this is peanuts.
We can't blame this on any kind of a record drought.
Okay.
And other analyses were going on.
Is there something else with climate change and more
sophisticated kind of stuff?
No, we can't pin this on climate change.
Climate change has gotten wetter.
So, now we can say let's go to areas where we don't have a lot
of high capacity wells here.
See what's going on there.
So this is another one of the monitoring wells that we have.
This is by Wautoma where there's some groundwater pumping,
some irrigation, but not a lot.
And you can see we go from this very dry period here of the
'50s.
We see as precipitation increased, water levels went up,
and then they kind of just go bouncing up and down.
You can see this in a couple other records as well,
that this is what water levels did.
So now let's compare this with the place where there's many
high capacity wells.
And this is one at Hancock.
It's at the field station that you drive by on the freeway here.
Well, look at this.
Wham! You know?
We see this plummeting of water levels here.
And actually, this becomes the basis,
the comparison of these kinds of records, the Hancock one,
with another location maybe 10 miles away or getting more or
less the same kind of weather, where we can start to make
calculations of how much missing water there is.
And we use that extensively.
We can see the lake record is more sparse in terms of how
often they measured lake levels But a lot of times we could see
the same kind of pattern, that the lake was bouncing up and
down, and then bam, the last 25-30 years we get this steep
kind of drop off.
The other tool that we employed here is groundwater flow
modeling.
Groundwater flow modeling is the 20th century.
I didn't say 21st.
But, you know, was something already that we were using
extensively in the 20th century.
We've gotten a lot better at it.
To figure out the ins and outs of an aquifer here.
So we used the groundwater flow modeling extensively.
We used it, first of all, to see if a pumping hypothesis is
hanging together.
So we could dispense with other kind of causes,
like record drought and all these kind of things.
We still want to see: can a pumping effect
be reasonably explained on our observations here?
But beyond that, we use the model to do a few more things.
Estimate irrigation water consumption,
fill in blanks among observation points.
You know, we have maybe 20, 30 observation points
on the network.
What's going on between those things?
And perhaps most importantly here, projecting futures.
Here's a groundwater flow model kind of looks like.
And what it does-- We let the recharge come in,
and this is divided up in all kind of little tiny cells and we
do little algebraic equations in each cell.
And the groundwater flow model mathematically routes the water
to these streams.
And while it's doing so, it keeps us a conservation of mass,
how much water in versus water out,
and it also tells us how high the water levels are in the
aquifer.
So, long story short, by golly, we could explain the impact that
we were seeing at our known observation points with a modest
amount of water consumption on irrigated fields.
Like two inches, which is what the biophysicists say is in the
ballpark of what they think the net consumptive use of
irrigation is.
Now, this drawing here is the drawdown map here.
So it's how much did the water table come down like this here.
Water table always comes--
It doesn't come down much close to streams.
It comes down the most the furthest you are away from
streams.
You see we have the border between Portage and Waushara
Counties is where we have the most drawdown here.
We very conservatively estimate it because you don't want to
overestimate in this business.
That the maximum was in this region,
and we're talking three, four, five feet.
Reality is probably seven or eight, so and so.
But anywhere within this yellow region here you could see
noticeable changes in the lakes.
Not that they necessarily all dried up or something,
but you see the trees are way up here
and the water level is way down there.
You know?
And boathouses are way up there, and water's way down here.
So anything kind of within the yellow here we've had
substantial drawdown.
Now, with the groundwater flow model,
it's harder to illustrate compared to drawdown map like
this, but we can estimate how much water
is missing in streams.
So just to pick out a few here.
A black dot means it's missing 30% to 44% in the headwaters.
A red dot is 10% to 30%.
Biologists say yeah, 10% is about the hit you can take
without harming a stream too much.
So we're able to make this kind of connection as well.
So let's talk about where we are in the present here.
So we've had more wells come in.
So we've cracked 2,000 in 2010.
2,200 in 2013.
You figure there's probably another 50 or 100 in the area.
And, you know, again, most of these were put in
without any kind of environmental analysis here.
You see how they're going here.
The red is the ones that have been put in
the last five or six years.
So we're kind of moving the development of irrigation to the
flanks of the original irrigated area here.
So we can expect that we're impacting
more lakes and more streams.
The central sands, we've pumped
74 billion gallons of water a year.
2013 being probably a typical year.
You know, when people say, well, let's put bricks in toilets
and things like that, it's like, okay, come on.
85% of the water use is irrigation.
That's the thing we have to deal with here.
You know?
A brick in a toilet is not going to help us very much.
[laughter]
These three counties, the central sands counties,
pumped a quarter of all groundwater that was pumped in
Wisconsin in 2013.
Dane sometimes flips in there and bumps Waushara out once in a
while, particularly wet years.
And this is what we--
I wonder if you're going to find this interesting.
This is what we use that irrigation water for.
So you always hear about potatoes.
Potatoes need a lot of water and all this.
But look what the largest irrigated crop is.
You know?
It's corn, you know?
You know the statistics on it.
40% for ethanol, 40% of animal feed,
20% for high fructose corn syrup, right?
I don't know.
But it's an eye opener
to see what the water is actually used for.
Now let's move into the future here a little bit
in our remaining time.
And the future here, we're not done yet, right?
We haven't shut down growth of high capacity wells,
and we're seeing that we're getting more growth on the
flanks of the central sands.
So I picked this region right here on this map here.
You can see it's right in here
where we don't have too many high capacity wells.
And so what might this look like in the future?
So I'm kind of being like a junior Ed Weeks here, you know?
Like what he did in 1971,
looking at what's going on in Plainfield,
I'm looking up here
what's going on in the Tomorrow River Watershed.
Amherst/Nelsonville, if you know the area.
So this is what we did.
You know, right now there's 113 high capacity wells for
irrigation and 11,700 acres.
Actually, this has grown some since that time,
including the high cap well that I have in front of my house.
We said, where are the soils good enough and the land's flat
enough and there's not too many boulders and things where we
might be getting additional irrigated land development here?
And when we took a look at this, it was like holy cow.
You know?
We could easily quadruple what we have today.
I'm not saying it's going to happen tomorrow or in the next
five or 10 years, but it's like, you know,
Weeks did that study in 1970 and all the sudden we fast forward
to the mid-2000s in having these things.
We could be at 400 and some high capacity wells and near 50,
000 acres in this area here.
So then we can do-- Okay, this is what groundwater flow models
are for.
What's the projection of what's going to happen here?
So here on the left side are the drawdowns of certain lakes here.
So we were talking about county parks before.
Here's a favorite county park in Portage County, sunset.
We might be two to four feet lower over there.
These are no parks here, but, you know,
a lot of people have residents and fishing and things.
Three to six feet is what we might be looking at.
This poor lake here, which is already impacted,
could be 3.8 to 7.9 feet.
Another county park here, you know,
two to 4.5 feet might be missing.
Okay?
So, you know, these aren't minor kind of impacts,
and if we're talking wetlands here, forget it.
They're going to be toast.
Now we can look at depletion of some streams here too.
The red circles are the main steam of the Tomorrow.
Anybody kayak or fish the Tomorrow?
Do so.
I think you'll really-- I think you'll really enjoy it.
It's a great kayak.
But, you know, the main stem here at this point here in
Nelsonville, 14% to 28% missing, 9% to 18%,
11% to 23% is how we capture that.
The tribs really get hit hard here.
You know, 44% to 90%.
Well, okay, that's just about completely gone,
that little bugger here too.
So, point being, you know, we need to think about
how we're managing our water.
So you may or may not be aware that there's kind of a--
Is it a quiet water war going on?
Well, a water war anyway.
Let's see how we got into this.
So before 2011, this is-- Again, I'm an Extension guy,
I like to make the message special.
I don't talk about the easy to remember,
and I don't talk about the 1% or 2% things.
But pretty much before 2011 anyone can pump all the
groundwater they want and, individually or with a whole
bunch of other pumpers, dry up any lake or stream or wetland
that they want to.
Okay.
2011 there's a case that went to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court told the Department of Natural Resources,
hey, look, you have a public trust,
constitutional obligation.
When somebody tells you that a high capacity well is going to
harm a water body, you have to look at it.
The Department of Natural Resources minimized that at the
time, said we're only going to look at these things
one at a time here.
So, if there's 20 wells that have already taken a water level
down this much, which was exactly the case in another
court case that went forward, and there's a couple of more
wells proposed that'll take it down this much more,
the Department of Natural Resources says, well,
it's only this much more.
You get your permit and go on.
So there was a legal proceeding on that because, you know,
this much more, this much more, this much more, this much more,
you have a dry lake.
And the hearings said, no, DNR, you have to look at the
cumulative effects here too.
So, since that time in the legislature,
there's been action to minimize or overturn
those legal proceedings here.
They pretty much go back to wild west days here.
Two things that came out in the last session here.
SB239, which would very unusually say anybody has
a high capacity well, you get a forever approval,
which basically is privatizing the public water here
in an odd sort of way.
We haven't done that before in Wisconsin.
This other bill went further.
It gave a permanent water right, but it rolled back all these
protections from cumulative impacts and multiple wells.
So we're basically going to go back to the wild west days.
The other thing that was curious about this,
they set up this kind of politically insurmountable
process where the legislature could designate and area and it
would get studied and then perhaps, you know,
there would be some action taken to ratchet back the pumping in there.
So it was sort of like, you know,
while you're trying to fill in one hole,
we're going to be digging a lot more holes and creating more
problems probably faster than we're going to be fixing them.
Right now you may be aware-- Oops, I didn't want to do that,
but that's okay.
You may be aware that
the legislature asked the Attorney General's office
to see if actions that happened
after the Supreme Court ruling
prohibit the Department of Natural Resources
from doing any more well reviews
based on environmental impact.
And so the legislature passed a statutory change that said, hey,
if the legislature doesn't tell a state agency explicitly to do
this or to do that, assume you can't.
And since kind of that came through the courts, DNR,
you can't do that because we already prohibited you
from doing those things.
So we'll see where that Attorney General's opinion goes,
what the Department of Natural Resources decides to do with it.
And I think lake groups and river groups are back to having
bake sales and that sort of thing to raise legal funds
to push back in the courts.
It should be an interesting time.
That's all my prepared remarks.
Tom, I could take a few questions.
- That'd be great.
[applause]