Patty Loew:
Water problems in central Wisconsin are resulting in a lot of finger pointing as the state legislature considers new rules. Last week we showed you how some lakes and streams in Waushara and Portage counties have vanished. This week "In Wisconsin" reporter Art Hackett investigates whether the problem is drought-related, new irrigation wells, or both. Either way, farmers are standing their ground near Stevens Point.

Art Hackett:
The Little Plover is a small trout stream running through potato fields and rural subdivisions east of Stevens Point. For the past three summers it's gone dry.

Barb Feltz:
The day it dried up and I came out here the banks were -- there was black mud usually underneath the water were cracked and dried.

Art Hackett:
One county to the south near Plainfield, Long Lake has gone from a fishing hot spot to a prairie.

Butch Bredow:
It just kept going down and down and down and it was gone, completely.

Art Hackett:
Unlike the sudden rupture that drained Lake Delton in the summer of 2008, the loss of Long Lake happened in slow motion. In 2000, UW Stevens Point groundwater researcher George Kraft worried there was little water in the Little Plover. At that time he was worried mainly about the effects from a new well drilled by the village of Plover.

George Kraft:
We've done some preliminary computer modeling that show if the wells get to their design capacity, that indeed will be missing maybe as much as 40% of the flow out of the stream.

Art Hackett:
Kraft was concerned the area's groundwater resources were nearing a breaking point. Nearly a decade later, Kraft says the resource is broken.

George Kraft:
Ten years ago I think this area here was a bubbling spring. You could see there is a side channel here that flowed in the day and obviously because the flows are low, we have just a few inches of water in most places. And now we can see that because the flows have been low for a significant time, we have more grass and such encroaching from the side.

Art Hackett:
The creek's survival depends on pumped water added by farmers and canning companies. Barb Feltz who monitors the Little Plover's flow at an old gauging station on her property says the reason the creek dried up is one of the pumps keeping it alive failed.

Barb Feltz:
Right now it's all artificial. After the dry-up with the dead fish, virtually if they would shut it off it would be dry.

Art Hackett:
But Kraft says those pumps which draw irrigation water from the aquifer just below the surface and others used by local villages and cities are all part of the problem.

George Kraft:
There have been much drier periods before and we didn't have these kind of low water levels. The work that we've done attributes about one fourth of the missing water to municipal pumping, about a quarter or so then to industrial pumping and about half to irrigation pumping.

Brian Wolf:
I believe it's very important that you begin to take a look at the cumulative effects of a well.

Art Hackett:
Waterfront property owners and representatives of the state's agricultural industries are both at the table as the state considers changes in Wisconsin's groundwater law.

Jim Burns:
My father built the first irrigation well in 1950.

Art Hackett:
Jim Burns’ family has been farming the central sands for over 100 years. He and other vegetable growers dispute their role in the problem. He said the problem is simple. It's been dry the last few years.

Jim Burns:
Well, that's to my mind nothing more than a consequence of the cycles we go through. In the past hundred years of history I hear about from old people, those lakes have been dry before and I've seen them already when the water was running across the roads around them. The problem is there hasn't been enough runoff. The snow in the wintertime soaks right into the ground and the rains aren't heavy enough to ever cause a runoff into those lakes. There has just been no recharge from their natural sources of water.

Art Hackett:
But Tim Asplund, a water resources scientist with the Wisconsin department of natural resources says something else is at work.

Tim Asplund:
There is a certain proportion of the drop that's really not explained very well by just looking at climate and precipitation patterns. There is a role of pumping, a certain amount is due to pumping. And it's a significant amount I would say. In the order of a few feet, maybe three feet or even more.

Art Hackett:
Burns, meanwhile, points to his own wells such as this one near Almond. It's been there since 1959. He says the depth of the groundwater has remained unchanged. The well has never been drilled deeper.

Jim Burns:
In spite of all that's happened since then, the water table here is rather static.

Art Hackett:
But Asplund says a better reference is a US Geological Survey monitoring well at UW's experimental station in Hancock, about ten miles from Long Lake. If you go to the USGS website, the well is marked with an orange dot meaning the water has hit an all time low. The graphs show ups and downs.

Tim Asplund:
Since the mid 90s or so there has been a steady decline in the water table here. We're seeing these kind of conditions similar to what we saw in the late 50s and 60s and this was after this period of record here was after an extended ten-year drought, whereas the drought conditions here have been fairly minor.

Art Hackett:
Match that against these maps prepared by UW Stevens Point professor George Kraft. They show a steady increase in the number of high capacity wells over that very same time period. At Lake Huron, Cris van Houten keeps moving his dock further and further from his house. At Long Lake two canoes wait, lending a new meaning to the term dry-docked.

Cris van Houten:
I believe it will result in taking out some of the irrigators.

Art Hackett:
The idea of just restricting irrigation, much less pulling out wells, concerns growers like Jim Burns.

Jim Burns:
Crops have become more valuable and the dollar volume is quite significant on 100, 200 or 1,000 acres of a certain crop year you're talking millions of dollars and that affects everybody in the area.

Art Hackett:
And he doubts stopping irrigation would bring back the lakes.

Jim Burns:
It wouldn't amount to no difference at all. You could quit irrigating tomorrow in the whole state and it wouldn't change the lakes one bit.

Cris van Houten:
They put in much bigger irrigation systems. Added new irrigation systems the last few years and they've killed the goose that laid the golden egg and they're taking more water than can be made up.

Jim Burns:
Wisconsin is blessed with plenty of water. Of all the states you couldn't hardly find one except maybe Michigan that has more water.

Art Hackett:
Except that water, abundant or not, is definitely not in Long Lake.

Butch Bredow:
I hope it comes back. It would be nice if it would. But you don't know. Nobody knows that.

Art Hackett:
The water could come back.

Tim Asplund:
It really does depend. This is where it's not independent of climate.

Art Hackett:
Mother nature could work a miracle. But the return of the waters could face an uphill climb.

Tim Asplund:
If we go in a wet cycle the lakes would come up on their own. When there is drought it will continue to go further down than what we've seen in the past.