Simplify Your Busy Invoice Format for Animal Science with airSlate SignNow

Busy invoice format for Animal science

this is a presentation from winchester academy welcome to winchester academy's virtual fall series i am maggie jones and i am the program committee chair of winchester academy thank you so much for tuning in for listening to us on the radio watching us on tv or tuning in on facebook or on youtube we're really grateful to the city of waupaca and especially to josh werner for making this space available to us and for providing this technology that we that we all needed to make this happen let me tell you about our next program for winchester academy it will be three weeks from tonight on november 9th at 6 30 pm the same is tonight dr jack rhodes will be our presenter he will be presenting a program called why westerns endure tonight's program is sponsored by vance and ann linden and as a reminder at the end of our program tonight at about 7 30 we will have a question and answer session so if you have questions that you would like to ask our presenter please keep them in your minds or write them down and you can submit them via facebook live our facebook live site or you can call on the phone then telephone number for the question and answers is 715-942-9917 that number again is seven one five nine four two nine nine one seven our program tonight is titled record rain the hydroelogical cycle and our presenter george craft is a free-range hydrologist who's been working on issues of groundwater sustainability in wisconsin he's also an emeritus professor of water resources and former director of the center for watershed science and education at uw stevens point his ongoing research and his outreach have been devoted to how unmanaged groundwater pumping is drying central wisconsin's safe lakes streams and wetlands and i present to you now mr george craft [Applause] thank you very much studio audience folks at home so today tonight's presentation is going to be about a few things it's going to be about groundwater and it's going to be about lakes and streams and wetlands and how groundwater is the thing that feeds all these things and then it's also about high capacity well pumping that takes water out of the ground and when we do so lowers water levels lower stream flows and lowers uh levels in in lakes as well so um let's start out with a couple g whiz things uh here uh i'm going to talk about really how wet it's been because uh you know i want to have something to be able to talk about over coffee tomorrow and then also something that passes for humor in my profession here which is the everybody know what the hydrologic cycle is well this is the hydro illogic cycle so let's take a look at the precipitation record for the last bunch of years if you live on a lake or you recreate lakes or streams you see water levels are out of sight right now even water levels in many of the lakes that had were decimated by groundwater pumping from uh irrigation wells just a few years ago we are in record territory no we're not in record territory we're we're beyond record territory here in terms of how much precipitation we get so i have a slide up right now um the alpaca precipitation records are are a little spotty this one is from stevens point which isn't too far away and pretty much has the same kind of data here uh so the this record here goes from 1930 to to 2020 here and a few things about that uh record the last six years have all been in the top 20 of the of the last 90. we haven't had an average year or a below average year since 2013. it's been what year what year what year what year what year 2019 we had a whole foot above our normal precipitation amount of of 32 inches the last time we had a decent drought year was 1988 we've had dry times and drought times no doubt about 2012 but had a incredibly dry summer but you know a good drought year we haven't had since 1988. that's how uh what it's been so to to illustrate this a little bit looking at this this year by year thing makes a little difficult what i'm going to do is i'm going to show you another graph and each dot on the graph is like a five-year average of precipitation so for instance we take 2001 to thousand five and that's 1.2002 to 2006 and i'm going to do this because hydrology isn't very exciting by pulling a curtain back and hopefully add a little intensity here so if we go way back here uh into the 1930s and you know we've all heard stories about how dry the the 30s are and that red line that you see in there is is the average precipitation of 32 inches uh it was a dry time it was a dry time in a lot of the country and in the central sands of of wisconsin and then if we look at the next bunch of years what happened so we get to the end of the 30s and to the to the late 40s we had this amazing uh a wet period uh that that happened at at that time here a whole string of years where we were considerably above average precipitation and then we go through another string of years here starting uh in the in the late 40s and going maybe to the mid 60s where we had year after year after year of of below average precipitation and this is when we also start having some good hydrologic records and so we could see you know what water levels were during some of these very very dry dry periods here so that brings us up to you know the late the late 60s or something like that uh and then what do we get we get a a a long period going from about 1970 to about 2010 here where we have pretty cyclical ups and downs and ups and downs and ups and downs we're not in general as dry as we were in the the 50s or as what as we were in the in the late 40s but we we just kind of cycle like that most people my profession you know given our age and things like that that was the the normal that you know we we came to assume well what happens let's take a look at one thing a little later on i'm going to be making reference to a series of years which i'm going to call the big dry and the blue dotted line there is around these years this is a catastrophic time where a lot of lakes and streams and wetlands in highly pumped areas dried catastrophically water levels went that way downstream flows went way down sometimes disappeared and you can see it really wasn't that dry compared to our past so what's happened the last bunch of years now from about 2013 until present wow okay we we we keep going up and up and up people say uh well you know what what's going to happen here and i can't i keep saying it can't be above average every year and yet really that's what way it's been since uh uh 2013 here and you can see you know we are in the wettest five-year period in history uh so you know no wonder we're seeing uh water levels uh so high stream flows so high even in lakes and streams and and wetlands that were uh severely pumping impacted okay there we go so we haven't talked about how water works just yet so let's let's talk about the hydrologic cycle and groundwater uh in the hydrologic cycle so the groundwater stuff is the blue uh in the in the subsurface in this cross section through the uh landscape here and uh it's you know just the water that saturates the spaces between sand grains and you know it's uh it's the water then that uh nourishes lakes and streams and what london is the water that we pump out of wells um the you know where does where does the groundwater come from comes from local precipitation we've been talking that we get about 32 inches of rain a year not very much runs off directly into streams and leaves the landscape but rather most of it soaks into the ground plants soak it up at the roots and send it back to the atmosphere about 20 inches of it leaving roughly about 10 inches to percolate through the soil and become part of the the groundwater the groundwater just doesn't sit there though but it flows from the landscape for where it comes in to streams where it's just trying to get out of the out of the watershed and go someplace else go downhill if we have a place like this dotted line shows here that is a low spot uh in the topography and it goes below the top of the groundwater well that's where we get lakes from uh and we we should can't think about lakes and many wetlands as really just depressions in the in the water table uh and we got to really think about these things lakes uh streams and wetlands and groundwater we have to think about them as a single resource and we have to think about managing them together so the scenario i just showed you was a no pumping scenario let's look at what happens when we when we pump groundwater so the first thing you'll see is that the there was a high capacity pumping well put into this drawing by the usgs artist here and when we pump groundwater water levels declined in the aquifer you know we are taking water out of storage we're doing something else with it and so it's like a bank account there's going to be less there and water levels decline uh we could see at the same time that that water that was going from the left to the right to that east stream there is getting intercepted by the well and because it's getting intercepted by the well and going someplace else the stream is deprived of of water too because the water level has uh has gone down and the water level is attached to the uh lakes the uh lake level has gone down as as well if we pump that well really hard and it's located very near a stream we might actually reverse the flow of the groundwater out of the stream in and into the well so that's the nuts and bolts about how this hydraulic system works to put too fine a point on it then there's two big wheels that control uh water levels and stream flows and and and lake levels one big wheel is how much precipitation we're getting we get a lot of precipitation water levels go up we get a little bit of precipitation water levels go go down the other big wheel is groundwater pumping groundwater pumping takes water levels levels down pump a little bit and only goes down a little pump a lot and it can go down quite a bit okay so this is this is what passes for humor in my profession i'm afraid is the hydro illogic cycle now uh hydro illogic cycle is just what what humans do you know uh when something's out of sight it's out of mind and i think people that are in other professions uh have this the same thing i mentioned financial planners have the same thing you know trying to tell people save for retirement this and that well it's a long ways away uh they don't worry about it but the hydro illogic cycle here we can apply it to flood times and we can apply it to to drought time so when there's a flood oh my gosh you know we have devastation we have financial loss sometimes loss of life it costs us millions of dollars to undo the damage um and then what do we do we said well you know we should do better we should uh quit building in in flood plains we should stop farming in in flood plains and yeah yeah all that sounds good and then some years go by and some more years and it's like well the the awareness and possible action on the flood side turns to apathy and you know uh if these things don't happen except on 10 or 20-year time scales people forget about it till the next disaster happens and then we we relearn the message all over again and it's the same with drought uh that you know we think about managing for these things that we shouldn't put too much demand on our water resources during drought times and then we have some good times there's plenty of water nobody worries about this and we move along and forget about some decent doing some decent progress against these kind of issues so uh you know case in point here we've had a lot of discussion the last few years about high capacity well pumping and the effect on lakes and streams and wetlands with all the precipitation we've been getting uh all water is high lakes and streams that are not impacted by groundwater pumping and those that have been uh very impacted by pumping and so this is long lake in the town of oasis east of plainfield in 2020 i just took this the other day but this is what it looked like in 2007 and will we forget to you know to to work on this issue about how to make our groundwater use sustainable and consistent with healthy lakes and streams and wetlands we'll see we're coming to some politics on this sooner than later okay so let's talk about the wisconsin central sands here and just to give you some landmarks here alpaca county about the western third or so is in the uh wisconsin central sands and you can see where stevens point plain field and uh the various counties are over here um a few things about it the central sands it's about 80 miles long and maybe about 50 miles wide um the the region has some 600 miles of of trout streams many of them uh you know very very prized high-class waters and we have about a hundred lakes that are at least 25 acres in in size or a real water rich area the hydrology on this thing is that precipitation falls across the whole landscape of the central sands of course soaks into the ground becomes part of the groundwater and then tries to get the heck out by traveling to the nearest stream again if it hits a low spot on the topography we have a lake and we like those um this area is the most intensively pumped in the state most of that water goes for irrigation and thus it has been the focus of groundwater pumping policy and politics in in wisconsin so uh when we you know visit a a creek or a lake and we have a nice time with our family or a little uh fishing expedition or how about this this summer for kayaks i mean kayaks are everywhere okay all these things including kayaks they're all dependent on groundwater without groundwater we wouldn't be having any of this kind of fun so most of the groundwater pumping in the central sands is for irrigation uh and and so we need to get into a little bit of history of the uh irrigation where we are with it right now so conflict over irrigation actually starts in the 1930s and this is a time when we're not pumping water out of the the ground this is time when farmers are putting uh big sucky hoses into streams and my friend justin issuer a potato farmer says okay you know it had a a four-cylinder engine out of a model t or something and a pump and you could irrigate a few acres with that uh this became a problem because streams were getting dried like right now catastrophically and you could see this the attorney general got involved and they start issuing a permitting system for uh stream stream withdrawals and then kicking people out of these things no you can't do that are all our water is part of the public trust in wisconsin you can't damage the stream for other users in the 1950s then we see new technologies become available for uh doing irrigation and for taking ground water out out of the ground with you know big massive kinds of wells and i think this migrated here out of nebraska part of it too is we learned how to fabricate aluminum during world war ii and now we can make irrigation machines out of this stuff is all pretty cool and now when you you know you go back and look at old newspaper accounts and also testimony at the um at the state capitol there's a lot of debate and discussion on water how we should manage it who gets to use it and to and to what degree here's a couple of end points in in that debate here one from the isaac walton league here that the public will not stand for destruction of streams we have the water now but what will we have if we pump it out at a faster rate so the kind of conservation side of this thing is that you know you'll pump it but let's be cautious here uh on the other side of it we have the agricultural interest saying no reasonable person is concerned about this this is an area of unlimited water we knew better hydrologists knew better back then much information vital to writing a new workable code is lacking so that was you know in the late 50s and then we didn't start talking about groundwater again until we got into the 2000s we just we just punted on this year after year after year uh anybody remember what happened in the early 2000s why we started talking about groundwater of all things of the perrier business uh oh somebody with a french name is coming and pumping our our water and you know and actually if you would have figured out jobs per gallon it wasn't a bad deal um compared to a lot of uses so what question whether you can do it sustainably or not uh but we didn't make much progress on on it in the early 2000s and we are still kicking that can down the road so let's kind of look at some more of this history here uh 1950 we only had three high-capacity wells in uh the central sands by the time we get to 1960 we have about 90 of them you know pretty pretty sparse uh across the landscape here and then uh in the in the mid 60s there's this fellow named ed weeks and ed is a united states geological survey hydrologist ed is still around us as far as i know i had some communication with him uh a little bit back and he studies the little plover and the irrigation uh impacts on it and so remember there's just a handful of wells around a little plover at that time but ed and his crew they did some phenomenal stuff they intentionally put a well right next to the stream uh and pumped it until the stream went dry just to make the point that these two resources are connected and you can't manage one without the other uh he did some other pioneering work calculating you know for each field that's irrigated at a certain average rate how much will stream flow go down in this in this basin here uh he also gave us some tools that we could have used to start managing water withdrawals with respect to the health of lakes and streams and this wasn't done with computers and stuff like we would do now i'm sure it was slide rolls and graph paper but he gave us the framework to to do that so 1970 comes along wow we're up to 449 high capacity wells and uh old ed weeks goes back to work in an area around uh plainfield here a bunch of lakes there in the headwaters of streams uh he publishes this report and he he has this warning in there that you know the amount of irrigation that was on the landscape then that was probably compatible with um healthy lakes and streams but he said be careful if this landscape around here gets to the point where around certain lakes half of the landscape is is irrigated here uh there's going to be issues and you know these these lakes are going to be drawn down by three four five feet during dry years which on top the natural drops there could be catastrophic to them so these were a bunch of lakes maybe some of you know them east of plainfield you see plainfield lake which at that when it was mapped here uh you know had a water depth about 10 feet long lake which we're going to come back to multiple times here had a maximum depth of about 10 to 14 feet there's lake huron there which is which is very deep i don't know about 35 feet or something like that and then there's all kind of little wetland kind of lakes in the in the area too so time goes on we still haven't worried about managing our groundwater and 1980 we got over 980 wells 1990 we know we're we've tested a thousand we're at 13.50 year 2000 we're at 1700 and then we have this period that needed a name so i named it and i'm calling it the big dry the big drive wasn't dry because there wasn't any precipitation in fact as we'll look at the graph again it was it was fairly normal within the bounds of normal uh highs and lows and averages no but it was during this time that we saw all kind of bad things happen to lakes and streams so just to show you again the the big dry you know you compare the big dry uh against that terrible uh drought period from the late 40s to like the mid 60s wow it wasn't that dry at all and we have records from that period saying you know the a lot of these lakes and streams were perfectly healthy from uh back back in that time even during time of natural drought oh and that's where we are now of course in this uh record kind of territory so this is what those uh lakes that ed weeks looked like was studying look like during the big dry and if you look close you can see the one on the left plainfield lake completely gone those little kind of shallowy you know wetland lakey things oh they're long gone and long lake there is well on its way of of permanent drying when this picture was taken there's a fellow named brian wolfe who uh a nice fellow isn't able to get around as much as he used to but he took these pictures outside of a cabin he bought the cabin in 2004 and he said well you know the water levels are a little down but they always come back they always come back don't worry about it and so he took this picture in 2004 he took this picture i think this is 2006. used to be a trophy bass lake uh here and we pretty much quit being a trophy bass lake right around that time and you know this is uh uh i think 2007 the thing was uh completely dry um and there was some uh misrepresentation of people saying this this lake dries up all the time but you know there's a folks that been on this lake a long time this maryland uh willa cat wrote a very touching essay about the disappearance of her lake this is a family cabin that they bought after world war ii there and here you know she reports we went fishing and turtle hunting even with lower water levels during the drought years i have pictures of us waiting during the dry years of the 50s and early 60s the lake never got as dry as it did in 2006 and afterwards and the fish were never killed out in maryland has these pictures of her she's one of the young gals on the left kind of mugging for the the camera and i presume those are her uh folks so one photo is dated 59 the other 66. uh not just there we go long lake uh the little plover river where thank god our friend ed weeks put in a monitoring station there in like 1958 uh and was was active for for decades and never came close to drying up this is what it looked like in 2005 to 2009 it would go dry in stretches uh the uh you know be the dead trout littering the uh uh bank there looked more like a walking path than a than a stream and uh here's another lake pickerel lake went through a lot of fish kills at the time this is a picture taken from the boat landing and the boat landing ends like 80 feet from the water when this picture was taken wolf lake is our county park lake in uh southeast port portage county became unusable uh during that period uh it it's usable again now but we went for a period from uh i think the park director said 2002 to 2017 or 18 where this was unusable for recreation uh uh back to nowhere uh in pine lake and washera county uh dried up creek you know more of these things here um so you know just to be clear with the abundant precipitation we've gotten over the whole bunch of last bunch of years here these things are are refilled uh they are even at at highs but the point being is they should never have dried we should not not have seen that kind of a situation just from the amount of uh you know because the season was kind of dry or something like that so 22 10 comes and we have 2 000 high capacity wells and this is about where we are present we have 2600 uh high capacity wells and you know maybe only a handful ever got any kind of environmental review for when uh we're going to be having too much of an impact on a lake or or a stream so sometimes people say what are you picking on the farmers for uh it's like well uh not that i want to my good friend justin isher was listening to this at home i don't pick on him too much uh but but this is where the water is getting used here irrigation is uh 85 this during a normal year about 85 percent of the high capacity well pumpage in the central sands wet years certainly a lower percentage dry years uh a higher percentage 2013 when we made this graph that was pretty much an average kind of year we pumped 74 billion gallons in the central sands and it's a lot of water the other categories here certainly they're all capable of contributing to depletion of lakes the depletion of streams but except in the case of the little plover they've they've pretty much always been a very small impact little plover is about i think 25 percent uh industrial municipal the rest of that is irrigation what do we use this irrigation water for by the way you know people seem to have us as potatoes potatoes potatoes but the major irrigated crop is is corn and corn goes for ethanol high fructose corn syrup and and animal feed and and that's all good uh potatoes of course you know important part of the economy and then quite a number of of other odds and ends here so that's what we use the water for um at this point i used to at one time i i did a lot of the work on this uh since 2006 or 2000 but now many many others have gotten into the uh a ball game here i used to explain my methodology and now i don't do that anymore i'm asking to take the word of me and you know the other scientists that have done a whole bunch of work on this at the united states geological survey and the geological natural history survey uh this is pretty good this is this is pretty hard science here but we uh we estimate you see this long kind of shape in here so this is a drawdown map uh so it's the pattern of how much high capacity wells are lowering the water table uh in the central sands here so that turquoise kind of color there it's a half a foot or less you see the big bull's eye there uh at the county line between portage and washer county you know that's getting on five feet now this is an underestimate in my business you don't want to overestimate anything uh and the other part of it it's you know it's a 1999 to 2008 average it wasn't even taking account the wettest years but this is what the pattern looks like that we have this long north-south kind of a feature here and the lakes that are within that these are the ones that are impacted so the folks here not those at home i guess um uh that's not showing up okay never mind but the uh you know the long lake and all that is sort of in the uh the second reddest zone over there which explains you know why we saw huge impacts there streams are harder to show you on a map um you know when we when we try to project a a map with streams on here so this is just a little chunk of uh the central sands it's actually southwest portage northwest uh washera counties it's how much stream flow is missing from these streams from from pumping and the red is 25 to 50 in these in these headwaters uh of a lot of these streams and minnesota biologists they use a criteria that 10 percent is plenty to take out of a stream before you have bad effects so you know a lot of these are in bad shape even to the point of that they're normally dry these days although not this year right okay um let's talk about policy and politics over groundwater pumping here a little bit so the uh great journalist lee bergquist milwaukee journal sentinel afraid he's retired that's really a shame uh did a great bunch of articles on this thing and he talked about our situation being a a war over water in the in the land of plenty when you start viewing this as a a contest or a war uh between parties it kind of makes a lot more sense and is easier to explain so let's let's talk about you know what are the what are the the the sides and the strategies of the uh i hate to use the word but combatants uh in this thing so on the one side there are let's first talk about what's the war over um the war is over this these two propositions here that high capacity well pumping should be unlimited unmanaged and without regard for impacts on lakes and streams and wetlands so anybody that wants to pump groundwater can pump as much as they they want or the other side of this is by a number of water advocates is that groundwater pumping should be allowed it should be managed in amounts consistent with the public right and health of lakes and streams and and wetlands so these are the positions of the the two parties uh the advocates for the unlimited on managed side over here that would be the wisconsin potato vegetable grower association and allies with the wisconsin um uh uh dairy business association manufacturers and and commerce over there too they in turn have allies in the uh legislature that uh you know there's certain kind of legislators that uh think any kind of regulations and infringement on on people's rights and so you know infringement on on pumping fits with that kind of legislative philosophy they also had allies with the previous governor and the previous attorney general over this side you know the people that are arguing for allowed and managed in amounts consistent with the public right and the health of the water bodies uh tend to be a fairly rag-tag uh a bunch that are from lake associations uh like friends of mere shadow would be example friends a little plover friends of tomorrow alpaca uh who have kind of banded together with an umbrella organization they get some assistance from uh environmental organizations in in in madison um they've done very well in the uh the courts you know the courts look at the the history of water management in wisconsin and and the the the courts have said well i'll tell you what the court said here just a a little bit here um perhaps they have at least someone who's sympathetic in the current attorney general of course the um the legislature has it hasn't changed meaningfully so uh nothing has happened over there so these are the sides here's the uh the contesting parties sounds so much better than combatants and you know we'll talk about how this thing proceeded come on there we go so when did this war start i think we could say that it started in 2011 with a ruling by the supreme court a unanimous ruling 7-0 before the beulah decision we had this thing this is only about new wells it's not talking about the existing wells on the landscape anybody can get an approval for a new high capacity well pump all the groundwater they want et cetera et cetera et cetera what the supreme court said and again it only applies to new wells here that the dnr must consider the environmental impact of a proposed high-capacity well when presented with sufficient concrete scientific evidence here so the supreme court's saying you know no dnr you know that groundwater is attached to surface water and then when people pump groundwater it's having these surface water effects we hold all the surface water the state to be a public resource uh subject to pub public trust you've got a duty here you need to do something so i think it happened in 2011 is where you'd say this new war was ignited well right away here you know we start seeing efforts to chip away at this so uh in 2013 there's a motion in the state budget the state budget is where you put in anything that you don't think you can get during the regular term or you don't want people to to see so representative dan lemay who got something put in there that said and he's from krivitz i don't know why he cared so much about this but uh a person may not challenge a high capacity well basically if we have to worry about the cumulative effects so we know that you know one well does a certain amount 10 wells does does top 10 times and and you know i think they were looking that we want dnr to have as little authority here so nobody can sue the dnr about this is what it says well this is news to me because i think you can sue the dnr about dog on anything right um but this this was in the budget bill well that was just kind of the the start of it here um dnr remember that you know the last administration uh was reluctant to use um authorities that it that it had uh and so dnr was only going to be looking at one well at a time they're not going to look that there's 2700 wells on the central sands will say what does that one well done well that one well is only going to take it down a half an inch yeah but all the other ones have already taken it down five feet where do you stop this and a judge ruled on this like dnr you know you know better you have the authority consider cumulative impacts the failure to consider is a gap in public trust enforcement so that's the next stage of this thing uh and then we see chipping away in criticism at um a water advocate group so this is a fellow i kind of think to be of him as a friend andy wallendahl with the potato and vegetable grower association he teamed up to write this editorial in the journal sentinel kind of trashing the lake and stream advocates they are untruthful they're responsible environmental activists we we are responsible active environmentalists they have no evidence pumping is causing problems so ignore all the studies that have been been done and we have studies showing nothing is changing groundwater levels are constant of course they're not we know they go up and down even if it's only for precipitation and by this time we already had a good scientific basis to know what pumping was doing the growers came out with a book like it's called high capacity wells factbook the question marks are mine it was a 60 page book it was dropped off at every legislative office in the state capitol and i believe it was given to every county board one copy for every county board member in all of the the central sands and then the potato growers association they start going around making presentations uh and then i'd get invited in to give another presentation which was sort of interesting but you know this was an intercept of uh email the main goal uh said the executive director is to head off local activists pressure uh that's going to have a negative effect on our legislative efforts so it's like oh where are they going with the legislative efforts so the press sniffed this out and it was exposed at that time uh here's some of the false facts that were in this book they were saying that irrigation water comes from some i wrote magic up here that's not their word that's mine magikot for deep aquifer it's magic because no one's seen it uh and it all you know they put the water on the ground it all seeps back to the aquifer the plants don't use any of it uh so there's they they literally said this so irrigation actually increases stream flows like well come on uh how could that be and then they they blame trees and we can get out historic air photos stuff with like the little plover area there's no more trees there than there was in the in 1960 right when during the drought the little plover river flowed just just fine and then they took a kick at the researchers here that they're beyond their expertise here it wasn't just me now they're talking about guys that have uh national international reputations um the attorney general schimel did something interesting here that would take me way too long to explain this is a case that's still sitting in the supreme court been sitting there for two years uh if and when they're going to take it up i don't know but they said dnr forget that supreme court told you you had to enforce the public trust i'm going to write a opinion that says no you can't and you know because you know we have one party in power there a secretary step dnr said yeah okay that's what he said and the governor was so for was uh all good with it and so i think for a period of two plus years dnr stopped reviewing high capacity well applications like the supreme court told them to they've started again because the new attorney general um withdrew that opinion but in the meantime over 700 high capacity wells were put in without any kind of a review and then we had 2017 act 10 a big collision between water advocates and water water pumping interests here there's a number of things in there and what what did this act do first of all it made high capacity well permits permanent that prior to this time dnr always represented that we can modify these things when they uh when when they come to blah blah blah blah blah legislature took that away no these are permanent the second thing that it did is that at least arguably high capacity wells get the ability to buy and sell high cap capacity well approvals with land transfers and some attorneys are concerned that arguably this gives them ownership of the public water for the first time in wisconsin history that you know if you can buy something and you could sell something it sure seems like you own it right uh and you know some attorneys are are concerned that this is the direction that uh uh that this is going um more new well approvals uh most new well approvals are virtually automatic and the last one here is that more study study is a great way to keep progress from happening and a political process of moving toward groundwater management in certain stressed areas okay let me catch my breath for a second well i'm letting the tension build if you really want to know what this is so we're in the middle of that last one right now so let's look what happened here the the study you told the legislature told the in our study high capacity well impacts on three lakes plainfield and long that we saw before and one that's a little south call pleasant plus any other area water body dnr seeks to determine that pumping is impacting so there's another a couple dozen lakes in there and you know dozens of stream miles that in my opinion needed to study and then they are supposed to determine if special measures are needed in other words let's manage pumping as a remedy to pumping impacts well that sounds pretty good so far right uh then dean are supposed to hold hearings write a report but then this is where it gets kind of shaky drop it off at the legislature you know it sounds like an unwanted puppy you know put this on the on the steps and walk away with it maybe we'll look at it maybe we we won't so what had happened here actuality uh and it was rumored that the some powerful interests here got this thing scoped way down instead of covering a couple of dozen lakes uh many stream miles the study got limited to just the three lakes um the business about if special uh measures are needed uh that's something that's still in uh in progress here uh hearings will happen next march and you know june is when they'll drop this thing off at the legislature and see if the legislature isn't inclined to let us start managing groundwater i want to say just a few words about this this study here um you know being an emeritus guy i'm kind of a bit player in the research world on on this anymore so you know i chime in and i'm managing a monitoring program for stream flows and things like that uh with folks at uw stevens point i wouldn't say we got 30 some scientists involved in this these are uh colleagues that i've had for a long time some of them and well some of them are rather youthful too but these are people with big reputations not just in wisconsin but in a country country and then globally these are people that are doing very good work there is a new crew of hydrogeologists those are groundwater scientists said at dnr uh and i i have the utmost uh faith in their capabilities to to do things where what they're what they're able to do that doesn't mean we agree all the time but there are good folks working on on this thing so uh you know there's just some statistics here about how much data they're putting this thing they're drilling holes they're looking at weld logs from existing wells and their stream flow measurements going on and they're doing some chemistry things with the lakes because when you pump groundwater unless water's going the lake you mess with its chemistry too and that could have a impact on the critters that that live there so this study will be a good thing um they're starting to dribble out a little bit of the results right now i'll be know chiming in as as that happens and you know but the study will be good what the recommendations are about how much we should impact these water bodies we'll see what that looks like and then whether the legislature decides ultimately to to do anything here that's the that'll be the million dollar question so that's where we've been with uh high capacity wells you know going back to where we start this we started this in 1930 with surface water pumping one of the 50s here uh remember people started getting excited about cigarette smoking in the 1950s and we kind of solved that one at least you know warnings and things like that by the mid 90s we've been at this even a longer time and i think it's time to solve it do we have any questions i've got one um have there been any instances where um adjacent landowners are pumping so much that they affect each other's wells and they end up having to drill deeper or get in disputes over the groundwater yes uh not in this state and not in the central sands if you know these wells are spaced and we're talking high capacity wells now not little home wells which don't have much effect um you know if they're spaced at quarter mile apart something like that there isn't much effect and you know the fact is for most of this high capacity well pumping you know so what if there's three feet of water missing one farmer said well why do i care that the water level's three feet lower i got an another 97 feet to go uh before my well is going to go dry so in general that that hasn't been a problem there have been a few uh home well folks whose wells have gone dry at least they report so and at least a handful of them look reliable to me that the the pumping has taken down water levels such that they've had to redo their wells let me repeat that phone number for people to call in any questions they might have for george 715-942-9900 george i have a question when you're talking about the new high capacity wells are they the same capacity that the older wells are you're talking about the numbers of wells and it seems in my driving around portage county area in washer county that some of these newer well caps seem to be substantially larger so are they drawing more water out good question can everybody hear your questions okay uh you know what of all the things i talked about tonight i didn't talk about what a high capacity well is and that's one that can pump uh at least a hundred thousand capable of pumping at least 100 000 gallons a day a lot of these are in the million million four uh gallons per day range i don't know that they've they've gotten bigger i think you know the technology say pre-1970 may not have been as good as it is today so you know maybe those old wells had a more limited capacity but i think pretty much uh now what's what's going in uh i think they're all pretty similar about a thousand gallons a minute would be my guess so based on a thousand gallons a minute i mean how much ground water is there actually down there that that that almost 20 almost 3 000 now i'm sure wells can pump that amount out without damaging the water levels elsewhere even in this wet period uh yeah uh well you know one kind of interesting time if any time you would like people to be pumping water be right now you know we see these cottages uh that uh are under water and things but it's you know it's not when we need irrigation water when when things are are are are pretty wet um and you know we know you know you saw some of the modeling we've done we know where problems crop up and kind of at at what densities and most of this is just having the the will to say we're going to want to do something about it thank you we do have one more question coming i believe just a second okay okay this question came from the telephone um i've become aware that now there seems to be high capacity pumping of manure pesticides and herbicides do you think this is a problem ah so you know one thing as long as you're putting water on fields if you have other things that you can put on uh if it feels it's you know it's timely and so among other things nitrogen fertilizer is routinely put into irrigation water and uh and applied to fields and i guess uh i'm not aware of any particular harms that that does and you know being able to put on with the irrigation water may mean that you don't have to put it in a different form where it's going to be more subject to uh to leaching i think we're pretty much out of the business of putting pesticides uh in in irrigation water uh and if we do it's just limited to uh fumigants but i'm i'm not up to snuff on that there is a um i don't know if i want to call it a a trend just yet but a practice where um manure from you to have this technology has to be a large dairy uh manure is separated into its solid part and it's to into its liquid part and the uh the the liquid part then is spray irrigated sometimes on on fields through uh irrigation systems uh you can imagine if all this works perfect perfectly it might work okay uh you know there's been a number of incidents and documentation that i've seen of uh people having manure sprayed across the road on their mailboxes into uh ditches and and that kind of thing so um i i don't know where we are on on that practice and you know um is it something we're walking away from or are we working the bugs out and i i'm not familiar with that right now there's another question coming from the phone one moment actually i've got two um first question is are the current wet and dry cycles related to el nino and or la nina weather patterns ah well you know okay i got a daughter who's uh uh studying among other things climatology at uw-madison and uh those cycles i i think are el nino uh la nina uh related at least the ones we saw in the past i don't know what the heck the current wet spell is is related to it if it's due to the uh you know these pacific ocean oscillations or or something else and i look forward to talking to some of my climatology colleagues and maybe learning a little more on that okay the next question is are there areas in wisconsin where there is an overabundance of water and i would interpret that to be flooding and how should that be managed well i mean you know right now with the amount of precipitation we have i think a lot of people would think right here in the central sands we we have an over of of of water right now and wish it would go away um one thing i tell people here if you look at that long history that i presented what happened after that that uh peak precipitation era of the 1940s well you know we went into 20 years of dry times uh so i don't think we can assume that we're going to stay as wet as we uh are right now and definitely into the future i i wish i had a crystal ball about that you know in terms of are there places in wisconsin where we have literally too much water all the time um i don't know i think certain farmers would curse certain fields uh that that have a persistent wet spot that would go away i think there's uh you know at one time there was a plan let's drain the horicon marsh and uh make make farmland out of it so they're you know before people recognize the value of wetlands uh they would say yeah you know we have over abundance of water here and we wish it would go um you know but besides the cyclical um kind of flooding periods we have i don't know you know just the way the landscape developed in concert with how much precipitation we have i'd say no you know on a regular basis we don't have too much water we do have another call-in question it'll be here in just a second for you george while we're waiting for that question george have you any awareness of the effect of property values in terms of this loss of water like long lake and those areas that have had dried up in the past and you know do those property values fluctuate now that the water is high this well that's a very good question so on on long lake um property values did decline substantially and the the property was reassessed at as not being late from property anymore and there was quite a a loss to local property taxes uh you know a lot of folks that are our water advocates you know they talk about um the property tax value of riparian properties here and it is substantial there's a statistic something like the three percent of land that's on lakes and streams in waushara county pays 30 percent of the taxes in that county um it and so you know a lot of times people are thinking this is environment versus economy but i really look at it yeah okay it is environment versus economy but there's also economy versus economy going on uh here you know the value of of of crop production versus the value of crop of um uh tourism uh property tax values you know people who live on lakes that are only there part of the year use very few services but they pay boatloads of property taxes here so the economics here is an important question here's a question why are there so many high cap wells in central wisconsin and are there other areas of the state that also have a large number of those wells ah one thing i don't like there's a trend on talk radio when they have somebody and they go oh good question that was a good question um in central wisconsin it's because the the uh the soils are too droughty uh to support good crop production all by themselves and you know we we have a aquifer near to the surface that's very productive so you know there's there's soils that could use irrigation uh to help uh produce economic value there's a groundwater resource there that's not that difficult or even expensive to get at um bang bang you know it would be surprising if it if it if it didn't happen uh and yes other parts of the state are are seeing development but not to the uh the size of what we have here so any goal you know you drive around there you see a lot of high-capacity wells rice lake uh the lower wisconsin river valley um i gave a talk in park rapids michigan a place where irrigation pumping is is booming um and they're trying to get some grips on but all the way over there to be these little sandy pocket areas here and the landscape was quite quite irrigated over there so um and now you know what we're even seeing in some of the silt loam soils and more southern wisconsin people are installing uh irrigation equipment there so it makes it almost even more imperative that we start thinking about how to deal with this here's another one what is the correlation between increased groundwater withdrawal and agricultural production or crappie yields oh well there's a big one um you know an irrigated friend of uh irrigated farmer friend of mine he got 200 some bushels per acre on irrigated land this year and he got about 120 on adjacent um non-irrigated land now he'll give you a caveat that he had different varieties and the non-irrigated one was shorter season and all these kind of things but the uh the yield bump there is uh is is quite clear that that uh uh that that that you'll see it on a regular basis did i answer the whole question okay good got a couple more um one caller said that his understanding was that um these high cap wells are very deep maybe as much as a thousand feet and um he's wondering why something in an aquifer that deep would affect a lake that's maybe only 10 feet deep at the surface okay interesting um it i think it's pretty rare for the i i should say maybe a typical irrigation well is 60 feet deep there's no water to be uh taken out you know we we have generally maybe about a hundred feet 150 feet of sand saturated with water we go below that and into the ground there's there's no water there to extract so you need to be in the surficial aquifer and even though if you're pumping at the bottom of the aquifer you know you're still dropping the water level from the from the top um you you just can't pump from the bottom and nothing happens to the to the top this this whole thing is connected um you know it'd be like i don't know maybe having a a bathtub and then pumping water out of the bottom of it not expecting that you're gonna see the surface water go down so these things are very intimately connected okay and then another caller uh is developing a philosophy or an idea that there should be a plan for drought similar like what we have now for covet or maybe should have for kovid where there's different levels of of management in both permitting and the use depending on what the current conditions are it is something like that in the works and is it feasible to execute uh the first part the second part of it is it feasible yes um and this would make a ton of sense wouldn't it wouldn't and then hopefully this will be in the dnr's recommendations in this report here but you know given how wet it is um and i shouldn't make these kind of predictions but okay i will you know i i think water levels and lakes and streams and wetlands and the aquifer are going to be staying high uh for a while here and so why not when we have uh all this water available here yeah if the dry summer next year go ahead and irrigate and probably everything will will be fine um the dnr scientists working you know with university ones are looking at what's the threshold on these various lakes before we start damaging them so you might be able to go two feet below average and the fish are fine everything else but you go five feet below average okay you got a dead fish and a lake you can't use anymore so the question is there you know when should you start throttling that system back um i think that would be a very good thing to to think about plenty of water sure go ahead and use it but we have to ratchet it back problems with that is how do you ratchet it back do you say well out west with prior appropriation the people that got their well their water permits first uh they are the last ones to lose their uh their their water pumping ability the ones that got their water permits last those are the first ones to cut off so is that what we would do we'd cut those off by a kind of seniority who's been in the system the longest or do we say well everybody has access and we're going to ratchet you all down together uh my favorite idea is that yeah okay i say for every irrigated acre someone has you get x amount of water um and then we're going to ratchet you back if if times get dry but then there's some sort of way some kind of mechanism that people can trade and buy water credits for each other so you imagine george has a cornfield next to his buddy justin who's got potatoes that year i'm not going to make that much money on the the corn field justin has the ability and way more investment in those potatoes uh he's got way more need to have water in there so maybe he comes and sees me and said i'm in a buying here how about selling me some water and i'm going to compensate you for having poor yield on your corn crop you know we can kind of think about mechanisms like that where we can be doing uh uh uh trading and purchases of of these kind of kind of things i i don't think it's rocket science okay here's a kind of fundamental question what is the difference between an aquifer and a water table ah very good so an aquifer is the geology that that uh holds groundwater so we know that you know in the the soil that there's water in there but it doesn't flow you can't pump it out with a well but if you keep going through the soil you get to the zone that we talked about being saturated that all the little spaces between the sand grains are are full of water and that's what we can pump and that's the aquifer the geology that's saturated with water the water table is the the top of the groundwater or if you want the the top of the aquifer uh and sometimes we use these these things a little interchangeably but we should be a little more careful are there any other questions from any uh the audience who are here and we have no more online questions and no more from the phone so we thank you mr craft uh for your presentation thank you very [Applause] much [Music] [Music] you