Well Water and the Little Plover River in Portage County, Wisconsin

A streamflow story, not a lake-level story

The Little Plover River is a short (roughly 6-mile) spring-fed trout stream running through the Village of Plover in Portage County. Unlike Waushara County's separate, better-known Long/Plainfield/Pleasant Lake story -- where high-capacity wells are blamed for measurably lowering three lakes' water levels -- the Little Plover's problem is streamflow: the river itself has dried up in stretches nearly every year since 2005, and even in wetter years has often run well below the roughly 4-cubic-feet-per-second flow that researchers consider the minimum needed to sustain fish habitat. These are two genuinely different mechanisms (a river's discharge versus a lake's static water level) playing out in two different Central Sands counties, driven by two different sets of wells -- not the same story told twice.

Portage County is also the most intensively irrigated county in the Central Sands region: more than half its harvested cropland is under irrigation, and the county leads the state in potato, processed snap bean, and sweet corn production. That intensity is directly relevant to the Little Plover story -- state and federal researchers (the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey and U.S. Geological Survey, which built a groundwater flow model of the river's basin) attribute the decline to the cumulative effect of high-capacity irrigation wells within the river's roughly 21-square-mile surface-water basin. Portage County had 777 active high-capacity wells as of 2017, an increase of 24% since 2011.

The history: drying since 2005, an endangered-river designation, and a land buyout

Sections of the Little Plover River were reported near-dry as early as 2003 and have dried in stretches essentially every year since 2005, with the years 2005 through 2010 particularly well documented. In 2013, American Rivers named the Little Plover one of America's Most Endangered Rivers, citing groundwater withdrawals for irrigated agriculture as the primary driver -- a designation that drew national attention to what had, until then, been a mostly local and regional story.

In response, the Village of Plover purchased roughly 60 acres of farmland in the river's basin with the help of about $1.4 million in Wisconsin DNR funding, took the land out of agricultural production, decommissioned a high-capacity well on it, and began restoring roughly half the acreage to wetland (filling in old drainage ditches) and half to upland prairie. Separately, WGNHS and USGS built a detailed 3-D groundwater flow model of the Little Plover basin -- based on roughly 60 years of data -- specifically to help evaluate how future well placement and pumping decisions would affect the river's flow, working with a Project Management Team that included the Village of Plover, the Wisconsin Potato and Vegetable Growers Association, the Wisconsin Wildlife Federation, the Wisconsin Wetlands Association, and Portage County Land Conservation staff alongside the DNR -- notably including the region's own agricultural-grower association at the table rather than only advocacy groups on one side of the issue.

This is not a resolved, historical problem. Reporting on the river's condition as recently as 2023 described flows running 40-50% below the healthy minimum even in a decade that was otherwise among the wettest on local record -- researchers point out that nearby groundwater-fed streams with little nearby well pumping have stayed within a healthy range over the same period, which is used as evidence that the difference is specifically attributable to well pumping near the Little Plover rather than regional weather.

The legal backdrop: DNR's authority over high-capacity well permits (statewide, not Portage-specific)

Two Wisconsin Supreme Court cases sit behind the state's current approach to high-capacity well permitting, and it's worth knowing what they do and don't have to do with Portage County specifically. Lake Beulah Management District v. DNR (2011 WI 54) -- a Walworth County case, not a Central Sands one -- established that the DNR has a duty to consider a proposed high-capacity well's potential environmental harm when presented with concrete scientific evidence, even where the well itself would otherwise meet permit standards. Clean Wisconsin, Inc. v. DNR (2021 WI 72) later confirmed that the DNR's broad statutory authority over the "waters of the state" is itself sufficient legal basis to consider a well's cumulative impact and impose permit conditions to protect those waters -- but that case specifically concerned high-capacity well permits near Pleasant Lake in Waushara County, not the Little Plover River in Portage County.

Neither case is a Portage County dispute, but together they define the legal framework the DNR now operates under whenever it reviews a new high-capacity well application anywhere in the Central Sands, including in the Little Plover River's own basin. Under Wis. Stat. § 281.34, a "high-capacity well" is one capable of withdrawing more than 100,000 gallons of groundwater per day -- the threshold that ordinary center-pivot irrigation wells for vegetable and potato farming routinely exceed.

What to actually do before buying near the Little Plover River

1. Ask the Wisconsin DNR Wells Program directly for the current status of any pending high-capacity well applications within the Little Plover River's roughly 21-square-mile basin, since the river's flow problems remain active rather than resolved.
2. If evaluating property directly on or near the Little Plover River, ask about current streamflow conditions and any history of the specific stretch running dry, rather than relying on older descriptions or photos.
3. If considering an irrigation well of your own on Central Sands land in Portage County, confirm with the DNR whether a proposed well would meet the 100,000-gallon/day high-capacity threshold under Wis. Stat. § 281.34, and what permitting review that would trigger given the documented cumulative impact already established for this specific basin.
4. Separately, if nitrate levels in a specific well are a concern, ask about that well's own test results directly -- elevated nitrate in some Portage County private wells is a documented but distinct water-quality issue from the Little Plover River's streamflow problem, tracked through the multi-county Central Sands Groundwater County Collaborative rather than through the well-quantity permitting process described above.