They Laughed When the Little Girl Wouldn't Drain the Bog — Until the Drought Came
They Laughed When the Little Girl Wouldn't Drain the Bog — Until the Drought Came On a Tuesday morning in July of 2012, a twenty-three-year-old named Nora Lindgren stood at the edge of a fourteen-acre sphagnum bog on her family's farm in Juneau County, Wisconsin, and watched her neighbor Dale Crowley's irrigation pivots run for the fourteenth consecutive day. Dale Crowley was pumping from a shallow sand aquifer that had dropped 4.2 feet since June 1st — his center-pivot irrigation system representing $340,000 in equipment and infrastructure now drawing against a water table that was declining faster than the rain was replacing it, looking like a man writing checks on an account he hadn't checked the balance of in twenty years. Crowley's two backup wells, drilled to 80 feet at a combined cost of $18,400, both came in below the minimum yield threshold for agricultural use by the third week of July; the county water authority denied his emergency surface draw permit from the Little Lemonweir River citing low-flow conditions; and by August 1st, Crowley had lost 240 acres of processing corn estimated at $168,000 and was on a waiting list for an emergency USDA loan. Nora had refused to tile-drain the bog since inheriting the farm in 2009 on the basis of a 2007 University of Wisconsin hydrology study showing that intact sphagnum bogs recharge adjacent shallow aquifers at 1.2 to 1.8 inches per week during summer drawdown — and Dale Crowley had told her, at the 2010 Juneau County Drainage District meeting, in front of thirty-one landowners, that keeping a bog was what you did when you didn't understand what land was for. A sphagnum bog acts as a slow-release reservoir — it accumulates precipitation during wet periods and releases it laterally into adjacent soil profiles during dry ones, maintaining shallow water table levels that tile-drained land cannot sustain. What looks like wasted ground in a normal year is the entire buffer margin in a drought year, and the difference between those two readings only becomes visible when the aquifer drops below the pump intake. This story is drawn from University of Wisconsin Extension hydrology research, USDA drought monitor data for Juneau County, Wisconsin, and Wisconsin DNR wetland conservation records. Characters and events are dramatized for storytelling purposes. Have you ever watched a community sacrifice its long-term resilience for short-term productivity, one drainage permit at a time? What's the most useful thing you've held onto that everyone around you said was standing in the way of progress? Share below. #JuneauCountyBog #SphagnumHydrology #Drought2012Wisconsin #TheBogWasTheBuffer #WetlandOrWastedGround
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