Farms’ thirst for water roils central sands

OASIS, Wis. — Cris Van Houten thought he was getting a little bit of paradise when he built his house on Huron Lake in Wisconsin’s central sands region. He could look out from his deck at the blue water and scuba dive in the shallows.

Less than 10 years later, he and his neighbors are watching their beloved lake dry up. The shoreline has receded at least 20 feet, leaving Van Houten with a new beach he never wanted, his dock high and dry, and scuba diving impossible.

Like other lake property owners, Van Houten blames the high-capacity water wells serving agriculture, particularly potato farmers. As the number of wells grows, Wisconsin finds itself in an unexpected fight. Despite being bordered on three sides by Lake Superior, Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River and crosshatched with innumerable rivers, streams and lakes, the state no longer can take water for granted.

“We’re all pretty sick of what’s going on here,” Van Houten, 73, said. “We’re losing our lake to make junk food.”

Farmers argue they’re just trying to make a living and say there’s no evidence the wells are depleting surface waters.

“We need to use the water to produce the food (healthy vegetables) to feed the world,” Tamas Houlihan, executive director of the Wisconsin Potato and Vegetable Growers Association, said. “There’s nothing more important.”

So far, Republicans who control state government have sided with agriculture. Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel issued a legal opinion last year saying the Department of Natural Resources lacks the authority to impose conditions on high-capacity wells based on their combined impact on state waters. Now the Legislature is on the verge of exempting well repairs, reconstruction and ownership transfers from the department’s oversight.

High-capacity wells, capable of pumping at least 70 gallons of water per minute from the ground, have been part of Wisconsin’s landscape since the mid-1940s. They began proliferating sharply in the 1990s as farmers looked to maximize yields and municipalities searched for water sources. In 1990, fewer than 6,000 wells operated in the state; today the state has 12,700.

No part of the state has a higher concentration of high-capacity wells than the central sands, 1.75 million acres in the middle of Wisconsin that has more than 800 trout streams and 300 lakes, including Huron. The region’s sandy soil doesn’t hold water well, creating large-scale irrigation demands for potato growers. Of the 3,100 high capacity wells in the region, 2,290 are used for agricultural irrigation.