They Laughed When He Fenced the Rocky Hilltop for Sheep — Then the Valley Flooded Twice That Spring
They Laughed When He Fenced the Rocky Hilltop for Sheep — Then the Valley Flooded Twice That Spring On a Tuesday morning in March of 2019, a thirty-four-year-old farmer named Colt Lindgren finished stringing the last section of fence around the 22-acre rocky hilltop on his family's operation in Vernon County, Wisconsin, and walked back down to the valley floor where his neighbor Dale Crowley was standing at the property line with an opinion he had not been asked for. Crowley's 180 acres of valley-floor cropland represented $2.1 million in land value and $340,000 in annual revenue — and in April of 2019, when the Kickapoo River came up twice in six weeks, it looked for two weeks like a lake that had decided to become permanent. The first flood event in April deposited 4 inches of water across Crowley's bottom 60 acres and left $47,000 in crop loss and field remediation costs; a second event in May added $31,000 in losses on ground that hadn't fully dried from the first; and Crowley's drainage tile contractor quoted $68,000 for a system upgrade that the county soil conservation office said would help but could not guarantee would prevent a third event in a wet year. Colt's 22 hilltop acres had 34 Rambouillet-cross ewes on them, zero flood risk, and a net return of $1,100 per acre on a combination of lamb sales and wool — and Dale Crowley, standing at the property line in March, had told him that running sheep on a rocky hilltop was what a man did when he'd run out of ideas for the good ground. A farmer who concentrates all production on low-lying land has concentrated all risk there too, and a wet spring does not distribute that risk evenly — it collects it in the lowest point of the landscape and presents the bill all at once. The hilltop that looks unproductive in a normal year is the only ground still working when the valley is under water, and the farmer who has something running on it has a diversified operation; the farmer who doesn't has a monoculture of flood exposure. This story is drawn from University of Wisconsin Extension crop and livestock diversification research, USDA flood loss data for the Kickapoo River watershed, and Vernon County farm records from the 2019 spring flooding events. Characters and events are dramatized for storytelling purposes. Have you ever watched someone concentrate every asset in the lowest-risk-looking location and then watch that location become the highest-risk one? What's the most important hedge you've ever built into something that everyone around you thought was unnecessary? Share below. #VernonCountySheep #KickapooRiverFlood #HilltopDiversification #TheRockyGroundStoodDry #FloodRiskConcentration
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