Peat bogs sequester a massive amount of the Earth’s carbon dioxide. But even as scientists work to better understand bogs’ sequestration, the wetlands are under threat.

On a cold winter afternoon, naturalist and educator Mary Colwell guided visitors on a chilly tour of the Volo Bog Natural Area in northern Illinois. 

Crouching down from a boardwalk that runs through the wetland, Colwell pointed to one of the stars of the tour: sphagnum moss. With her encouragement, the group touched the little branch-like leaves of the pale green moss growing at the base of a nearby tree.

“Then in warmer weather, this is so soft,” Colwell said. “It’s unreal.”

Bog ecosystems are some of the most efficient carbon storage ecosystems in the world. They cover just 3% of the Earth’s surface, yet hold up to 30% of global carbon.

The bog’s keystone species, sphagnum moss, plays a key role in its storage capacity. Sphagnum acts like a sponge — it holds up to 20 times its weight in water.

“Sphagnum moss itself is incredible,” Colwell noted. “It’s very slow-growing.”

It grows so slowly, in fact, that it can take thousands and thousands of years for a peat bog to develop. Volo Bog started to form from a glacial lake more than 6,000 years ago. It’s still encroaching on the center of the lake, called the “eye” of Volo Bog.

But while bog ecosystems provide habitat, filter water and store carbon, they have been disappearing for decades. Wisconsin has lost half of its wetlands. In Illinois, more than 90% of wetlands have been lost. There are about 110 million acres in the United States, with more than half in Alaska — but nearly 70% have been drained and developed over the past 100 years. 

Unlocking sphagnum moss’s secrets 

Scientists think sphagnum moss may hold important lessons about carbon dioxide sequestration, but there’s much they don’t know. 

Sona Pandey is the principal researcher at the Danforth Plant Science Center in the St. Louis suburbs and is part of a team researching sequestration and bogs. 

“The first time I saw a peat moss under the microscope I just literally fell in love with it,” Pandey said. “That’s the only way to describe it. It’s beautiful to look at.”

Pandey’s research team is growing moss in a lab, studying its DNA, and trying to figure out how it is threatened by climate change — and how it could be a solution. 

Moss excels at storing carbon. It thrives in waterlogged, acidic conditions. It doesn’t decompose, acting almost like a giant mat of living carbon. 

But when it’s threatened, that carbon has to go somewhere. The main threat to bogs – draining for development and agriculture – exposes these waterlogged species to air, which kick-starts the decomposition process from microbes. 

“It is a possibility that all the carbon which is stored in peat bogs at the moment will be released to the atmosphere,” Pandey said, noting how it will become a greenhouse gas.

She said if we understand these mosses on a microscopic level, scientists and conservationists can better protect and restore them on a larger scale. Her research could lead to making informed decisions about which species would be more successful to reintroduce as part of potential restoration projects.

Protecting what’s left 

Historically, bogs have been undervalued, often drained to make land more usable.

Trisha Atwood, an associate professor and ecosystem ecologist at Utah State University, said people are slowly beginning to see them in a new light.

“There has been substantial changes in people’s perception of these wetlands just because they don’t typically hit people’s top 10 most beautiful places,” Atwood said. “Governments are starting to realize that they have these other benefits.”

While forests and forest soil often get attention for their carbon sequestration, Atwood said wetlands are even more important, storing 30 to 50 times faster and at a higher rate than other systems.

“They’re like no other ecosystem on Earth,” she said.

Even as some aspects of wetlands are seen as more valuable, a 2023 Supreme Court decision rolled back most existing protections for these ecosystems. The Sackett v. The EPA decision ruled that the Clean Water Act doesn’t protect wetlands that aren’t continuously connected to bigger bodies of water. The decision has been criticized for putting ecosystems, like bogs, at risk. 

Rebecca Hammer is an attorney for the freshwater ecosystems team at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group. She said peat bogs are particularly affected by the Sackett decision because they are mostly isolated from larger bodies of water.

“They generally begin their life as a lake that doesn’t have a drainage or connection to another water body, which allows vegetation and plant material to collect,” she said, “and the sphagnum mosses that grow there to collect over 1000s of years.”

About half of U.S. states have existing legal protections for wetlands, but these ecosystems in 24 states are left without any protections, legal or otherwise.

There are bogs scattered throughout the Mississippi River basin all the way down to the coast. 

Hammer said the decision could have a near-permanent effect on bogs.

“When peat bogs are destroyed or polluted, affected by development, we lose all of those benefits,” she said. “We really can’t replicate peat bogs. They take thousands of years to form. So once they’re gone, they’re gone.”

Colwell, who takes visitors on tours at the Volo Bog, says more needs to be done to protect what’s left. 

“We’re trying to restore these natural systems,” she said, “and when we restore them, they can increase the amount of CO2 that they will take.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri, of which Wisconsin Watch is a member, in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest. Sign up for Wisconsin Watch’s newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

Bogs hold a climate solution through carbon capture, but many have been drained is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Katie McCullough loved Arizona winters, but hot summers could be a drag. After purchasing a recreational vehicle, she spent time trekking cross-country to deliver shelter dogs to a no-kill rescue. 

McCullough, 56, visited friends and family, too, with her own canine pack — then, Rosy, Eddie Spaghetti, Ky, Pally, Duke, Nudge and Nutter Butter — a tossed salad of breeds.

During the pandemic summer of 2020, she once again loaded her RV and found respite in Dane County public parks. Why not make Wisconsin a half-year thing, she thought, with space for her and the pups?

McCullough, who works in cybersecurity, heard about 36 acres near the village of Rio. She purchased the property, sight unseen, and its spring-fed pond the following year.

“I don’t regret it at all,” McCullough said with a laugh.

She soon met the neighbors — about 10 furry lodge dwellers.

McCullough realized she had a beaver problem.

They live atop a small muddy island and constructed a dam roughly a decade ago. Fuzzy cattails grow across its 20-foot breadth. The dam left a once-lovely creek bone dry. 

Backed-up water enlarged the surrounding marsh and pond, where sandhill cranes, geese and ducks meander through a boggy stew of algae, lily pads and submerged logs.

Rooted in sodden ground, tall oaks — some more than 100 years old — withered and toppled. McCullough couldn’t access several acres of her property. 

Friends, family and locals recommended trapping the rodents and blowing the dam sky-high with Tannerite. 

The solution seemed dramatic and destructive.

“We’re all here for a purpose, right? To think that beavers are just born a nuisance,” McCullough said. “It’s tough because some populations do have to be controlled if there aren’t natural predators. But I’m not good at being a natural predator.”

Surely, other options besides trapping or bystanding existed.

Damming behavior

Beavers once numbered between 60 million and 400 million across the North American landscape, but development and unregulated hunting nearly decimated them. Twentieth-century conservation efforts helped beavers recover somewhat — to an estimated 1.5% to 20% of their historical population.

Conflicts with humans ensued as beavers returned to their former ranges: chewing trees, plugging culverts, flooding roads and farm fields.

Few studies quantify the costs of beaver damage, and the limited data are decades old. One pinned annual timber losses in Mississippi at $621 million, adjusted for inflation, while another determined that every dollar spent on beaver control saved that state $40 to $90.

Traditional responses involve trapping and dam breaching, but generally, these interventions require regular enforcement because new beavers move in.

Surveys show trapping support increases when people experience beaver-related damage, but an expanding body of research showcasing beavers’ ecosystem and economic benefits is drawing attention to the drawbacks of removal.

When beavers remain on the landscape, they create wetlands, which mitigate climate change impacts like drought, wildfires and flooding — problems increasingly seen in the Midwest. Other wildlife also depends on the habitat.

A growing chorus of advocates and ecological consultants are popularizing flow control devices, a solution to beaver flooding problems. They limit beavers’ damming behavior and reduce impacts on human infrastructure.

Hand-constructed with flexible plastic pipes and wire fencing, several types exist: pond levelers, culvert fences and decoy dams. Some bear trademarks like Beaver Deceiver and Castor Master.

They aim to reduce the desirability of potential dam sites, redirect beavers’ attention or “sneak” pond water away without attracting their notice. And they aren’t terribly common in Wisconsin. 

McCullough opted for coexistence.

State wildlife agencies generally regulate a trapping season to manage beaver populations and minimize property damage. Wisconsin’s forestry and fisheries divisions, dozens of municipalities, railroad companies and some tribal governments also contract with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to remove beavers and dams from designated lands and waters.

The state imposes few restrictions for handling nuisance beavers on private property.

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources doesn’t remove them at landowner request or offer damage compensation, but people may hunt or trap beavers and remove their dams on their property without obtaining a license.

If a beaver dam causes damage to a neighboring property, the injured party may enter the property where the dam lies and remove it without being charged with trespassing.

There also are risks to ignoring one’s beavers. 

People who own or lease beaver-occupied land and don’t allow their neighbors to remove them are liable for damages.

Ditching dynamite

But Wisconsin wildlife managers recommend people consider alternatives before killing the animals, including flow devices like pond levelers.

They date to at least the 1920s when USDA Chief Field Naturalist Vernon Bailey proposed using an “entirely successful” drainage pipe constructed with logs and threaded through the dam.

“It is useless to tear out or dynamite beaver dams, as the beavers, if active, will replace them almost as fast as destroyed,” he remarked.

Subsequent testing indicated that early levelers sometimes failed, but the concept has evolved.

Modern devices control water height using a flexible plastic tube resting on a pond’s bottom. A cage surrounds the intake and prevents beavers from swimming close enough to detect flowing water, which researchers believe triggers their building itch. The other end of the tube passes through the dam, forming a permanent leak.

Installers say levelers, which cost $2,000 to $4,000, function for about 10 years, and annual maintenance takes less than an hour. They can modify setups to accommodate fish passage, narrow and shallow streams, large ponds and downstream beaver dams.

“No two beaver situations are the same,” said Massachusetts-based Beaver Solutions owner Mike Callahan, who has installed more than 2,000 flow devices and trains consultants. “The best solutions obviously are going to be ones that work for the beavers and that work for us.”

States throughout the Mississippi River basin, including Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota and Missouri, recommend flow devices, but with varying awareness of best practices. The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and University Extension even advertised Bailey’s design from 1922.

Pond levelers relatively uncommon in Wisconsin

Wisconsin residents have constructed beaver pond levelers, as have the Department of Natural Resources and USDA. But state natural resources staff say they rarely receive inquiries.

Despite their simple design, obtaining state authorization to install a flow device often takes longer than other activities like small-scale dredging and riprap installation because Wisconsin lacks a standard pond leveler permit.

Projects can vary across designs, siting and placement, with potentially significant impacts to where and how pond water flows, said Crystal vonHoldt, department waterways policy coordinator.

That makes it hard to develop a catch-all permit, but time-pressed agency staff certainly welcome any opportunity to streamline their review process, she said.

The law requires employees to evaluate impacts to water quality, navigation, wildlife, scenic beauty and public access to boating and fishing.

A department staff member told McCullough’s contractor and restoration ecologist Clay Frazer — who has overseen multiple beaver-related projects in Wisconsin like mock beaver dams — that many landowners opt not to install them after learning of the challenges.

Hiring a consultant to navigate the process can be cost-prohibitive. McCullough’s bill exceeded $10,000, but a grant offset it.

Proponents say the meaty requirements usher landowners toward a lethal resolution, which Wisconsin’s beaver trapping rules seemingly favor.

Community levels with beavers

Billerica, Massachusetts, had a flooding problem.

The town’s troubles followed a 1996 statewide voter referendum that banned foothold traps. Conflicts increased as the beavers expanded into the community, home to more than 42,000 residents along with wetlands, streams and two rivers. Prime habitat.

Things came to a head in 2000, and the town contracted with Callahan to address the problem non-lethally. At 43 locations where the town traditionally utilized trapping, he installed flow devices.

“They’re kind of instrumental in preventing certain culverts and major roads here in town from getting flooded,” said Isabel Tourkantonis, the town’s director of environmental affairs.

Trapping continued at another 12 sites because the devices either failed or the landscape made their use untenable.

Non-lethal management saved Billerica taxpayers $7,740 annually in avoided trapping and dam removal costs, according to a town analysis. The number of beavers killed dropped more than fivefold.

Maintaining 380 acres of beaver-created wetlands provided an estimated $2 million of free services each year, including water filtration, flood reduction and plant and wildlife habitat.

“It’s not just a matter of, ‘Let’s trap them and get rid of them,’” Tourkantonis said. “They also create important habitat that needs to be protected.”

Since the study concluded five years ago, the number of conflict sites has increased to 60, and Billerica annually budgets $15,000 for trapping and device maintenance.

Compared to fixing beaver-damaged roads and culverts, it’s a bargain, Tourkantonis said.

“If there’s a way to co-exist with an important animal population, that’s, I would think, the goal.”

Massachusetts landowners navigate a different permitting process.

To install a flow device, trap beavers out of season or remove a dam, they only need to obtain approval from a local health board or conservation commission — generally at little cost. It takes a few days.

Staff at the federal, Vermont and Massachusetts fish and wildlife agencies characterized the events that led to Massachusetts’ current system — beginning with the 1996 referendum — as a “calamity by design.”

The changes effectively ended state-regulated wildlife management, they reported, leading to increased confrontations with and negative views of beavers along with illegal trapping.

However, Tourkantonis said the new procedures cut “through the red tape and make it a little bit easier for folks to address an immediate public safety hazard.”

Flow devices have limits

Scientists have conducted virtually no peer-reviewed research evaluating the effectiveness of flow devices.

But studies supporting their use documented financial savings, high customer satisfaction and trapping reduction.

Callahan analyzed 482 sites where he added flow devices or trapped and found only 13% of pond levelers failed within two years compared to 72% of trapping sites to which beavers returned.

Yet flow devices aren’t silver bullets.

A study conducted by the USDA’s wildlife control agency in Mississippi indicated that half of levelers failed to meet landowners’ goals — although the participants didn’t always maintain them.

Callahan, like many coexistence proponents, attributes device ineffectiveness to the faulty installation of outdated models. They say this can confirm preexisting beliefs that flow devices are ineffective, or at best, temporary solutions.

“If they’re designed properly with the right sturdy materials and installed properly, these things work great,” he said. “If you have a crappy design, yeah, it’s not going to work.”

But Callahan estimates one in four beaver showdowns in Massachusetts require trapping.

Levelers aren’t effective in high-flow streams or developed floodplains, he said, where even a foot of water could swamp a home or neighborhood.

Drainage and irrigation ditches also aren’t ideal sites nor locations where water must be lowered to a depth in which beavers can’t live. Otherwise, they’re liable to build a new dam.

Jimmy Taylor, assistant director of the USDA’s National Wildlife Research Center, said flow devices have their uses but aren’t a beaver control substitute.

“If you’re looking at a large scale, simply putting in flow devices may not solve all of your problems, and it might not even be an applicable tool,” he said.

Damage control can alternatively involve removing dams, lodges and the plants beavers eat; installing fences or scary props and noisemakers; applying spicy or bitter repellants to food sources; and shooting.

“To try to just focus on one tool only, whether it’s lethal or non-lethal, is just not pragmatic,” Taylor said.

People tolerate beavers until conflict reaches a threshold.

One study found attitudes toward them soured in urban and rural areas, and people grew more accepting of lethal control as damage severity increased. Meanwhile, acceptance of flow devices decreased.

But another survey found that most landowners were open to beavers remaining on their property when they were offered incentives like technical assistance or compensation — a finding that could bolster support for investing in non-lethal techniques.

Previous efforts in Congress to appropriate several million dollars toward those efforts have proven unsuccessful.

Seeking to change ‘hearts and minds’

Frazer and McCullough hope to streamline Wisconsin permitting, making their case “one good flow device at a time.”

“It’s statutes. It’s permitting,” Frazer said. “But it’s also just hearts and minds. It’s people changing the culture of how they think about beaver.”

Their ponds look messy — dead trees and all — but to beaver backers, their value rivals rainforests or coral reefs.

“Let nature participate in what we need to accomplish,” McCullough said.

A smiling, buck-toothed beaver statue inconspicuously sits on the gravel driveway outside her home. Its concrete paws grasp a skinny tree stump, chewed to a sharp point.

McCullough’s sister, who lives in North Carolina, located the cartoonish creature on Facebook and gave it a fresh paint job — a family rib over McCullough’s beaver troubles.

Too heavy to mail, the 50-pound figurine hitched rides to weddings and socials, crawling its way north to Wisconsin like a baton handoff in a relay.

After a year, it finally arrived.

Editor’s Note: This story was updated to clarify how many beavers were on Katie McCullough’s property.

This story was produced in partnership with the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network, of which Wisconsin Watch is a member. It was also reported with support from the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems. Sign up for Wisconsin Watch’s newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.

Opting for coexistence: Some Wisconsin landowners learn to live with beavers is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Flood control along the Mississippi River is a central piece of a newly passed federal law — work that advocates believe is critical as the river basin sees more frequent and severe extreme weather events due to climate change. 

The Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) is passed by Congress every two years. It gives authority to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to undertake projects and studies to improve the nation’s water resources. 

Signed into law Jan. 4, this year’s package includes studies on increased flooding in the upper basin, flood mitigation measures throughout the river system, ecological restoration, and a $6 billion floodwall in Louisiana. 

The Mississippi River is managed in large part by the Army Corps, so it often features prominently in the bill, with a dual aim of making the river more suitable for shipping and restoring environmental degradation from flooding, nutrient pollution and climate change. 

Kirsten Wallace, executive director of the Upper Mississippi River Basin Association, called this year’s WRDA “a pretty special one.” She said it contained wins for many of the diverse stakeholders along the river, including shippers, environmental advocates, riverfront communities and federal and state agencies — who don’t always agree. 

Advocates lauded the law’s emphasis on nature-based solutions. In a press release, Stephanie Bailenson, policy team lead for The Nature Conservancy, said, “Since 2016, Congress has directed the corps to consider natural and nature-based solutions alongside or instead of traditional infrastructure. This latest act continues that trend.”

But all of these projects are only promised because funding doesn’t come until later, when Congress appropriates it. Many projects authorized in previous versions of the law are still unfunded, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Here’s what will affect the river in the Water Resources Development Act of 2024: 

Study of flood risk on the upper Mississippi River

The law authorizes a large-scale study of flooding on the Upper Mississippi River System, which includes the Mississippi River from its headwaters to where it meets the Ohio River at Cairo, Illinois, as well as the Illinois River and portions of some smaller tributaries.

The upper river has seen two major floods in the last few years: one in 2023 and one in 2019, which lasted for months and caused billions of dollars in damage. 

The study’s chief goal: figuring out how to reduce flood risk across the entire river system, instead of relying on municipalities to try to solve flooding problems themselves, which can sometimes have impacts downstream. North of St. Louis, for example, levees constrain the river to protect communities and valuable farmland from flooding — and some levee districts have raised those levees higher, safeguarding themselves but effectively pushing floodwaters faster downstream. 

“This plan allows more of a comprehensive way for levee districts to improve what they currently have … in a way that doesn’t put them in a position to be adversarial or just impose risk somewhere else,” Wallace said. 

She said the study will be a challenge, but that levee districts are eager for solutions as flood risks and heavier rainfall increase. 

Once the study receives funding, it will be led by the Army Corps’ St. Louis District, Wallace said. It’ll solicit input from cities, towns and ports along the river, recreators, the shipping industry and federal environmental agencies like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Geological Survey. 

Flood projects for cities from the headwaters to the delta 

Cities and towns along the river could get help for the localized effects of flooding too, thanks to several projects authorized by the law. Upstream, that includes La Crosse, Wisconsin, which will enter into an agreement with the Army Corps to study the role of the city’s levees, which were constructed around the river’s record flood in 1965. 

“We have to have an eye on maintaining what we’ve got and looking toward the future and whatever conditions the river might undergo to be prepared as best we can,” said Matthew Gallager, the city’s director of engineering and public works. “Because obviously, nature is going to win.” 

Downriver, Louisiana secured the largest project authorization within the law. To protect communities in St. Tammany Parish, a county north of Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, plans to build a $5.9 billion levee and floodwall system totaling 18.5 miles in length to protect over 26,000 structures, most of which are family homes. 

The St. Tammany Flood Risk Management Project is slated to receive $3.7 billion in federal funding. The other 35% will come from non-federal sponsors, such as the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA). 

“By authorizing the St. Tammany project for construction, Congress recognizes again the national importance of Louisiana and that CPRA can work with the federal government to execute a multi-billion coastal protection project successfully,” said CPRA Chairman Gordy Dove.

The law also authorizes a federal study of the Lake Pontchartrain Storm Surge Reduction Project, a component of Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan meant to protect nine parishes bordering the lake. The Army Corps will investigate whether the proposed project to reduce flood risk is in the federal interest. 

Other approved flood control projects will be funded along the lower Mississippi River and its tributaries, including the Ouachita River in Louisiana. Several counties in Mississippi will also receive funding to improve environmental infrastructure, such as water and wastewater systems. 

Near Memphis, the bill authorizes the Hatchie-Loosahatchie Ecosystem Restoration project, which covers a 39-mile stretch of the lower Mississippi River. The project aims to manage flood risks while also restoring and sustaining the health, productivity and biological diversity of the flyway. 

In New Orleans, a study was authorized to investigate ecosystem restoration and water supply issues, such as the mitigation of future saltwater wedges that threaten drinking water and wetlands at the very end of the Mississippi River. 

More support for the Upper Mississippi River Restoration program 

The law also increases the amount of money Congress can give to the Upper Mississippi River Restoration program, which funds habitat restoration activities and scientific research on the upper river. 

Congress increased the money it can direct to the research part of the program by $10 million, bringing the total the program can get to $100 million annually. 

The funding boost “really is a recognition of the value of the science … the understanding that has improved about how the system is functioning over the last three decades,” said Marshall Plumley, the Army Corps’ regional manager for the program. 

If given extra funding, Plumley said program staff want to use it to better understand the effects of the increased amount of water that has flowed through the river in recent years. That increase, partly attributed to wetter conditions due to climate change, is changing the river’s floodplain habitats, including forests and backwater areas. 

A change to how new water infrastructure gets funded

The Mississippi River functions as a water superhighway, transporting around $500 million tons of goods each year. Infrastructure to keep shipping running smoothly is costly, and one adjustment in WRDA 2024 is aimed at shifting the burden of those costs. 

Taxpayers have been funding inland waterway infrastructure for nearly two centuries, but in 1978 Congress established the Inland Waterways Trust Fund, which requires the private shipping industry to pitch in. 

Today, the trust fund’s coffers are filled by a 29-cent per gallon diesel tax on commercial operators that use the Mississippi River and other inland waterways, adding up to about $125 million per year in recent years. New construction — like wider, more modern locks and dams on the upper river — is paid for through a public-private partnership: the private dollars in the fund, and federal dollars allocated by Congress. 

Until recently, the private dollars covered 35% of new construction costs, and federal dollars covered 65%. The new WRDA adjusts that to 25% and 75%, respectively. 

Advocates for the shipping industry have long believed taxpayers should have a bigger hand in funding construction because it’s not just shippers who benefit from an efficient river. 

The balance in the trust fund “always limits” construction that can happen in a given year, said Jen Armstrong, director of government relations for the Waterways Council. 

“We can’t afford to have projects take three decades or two decades to complete,” Armstrong said, “because we have other locks that are deteriorating.” 

Armstrong said she believes shifting more of the cost to the federal government will accelerate those projects. 

Not everyone supports the cost share change, however, including American Rivers, which has opposed the creation of new locks on the upper Mississippi in favor of helping the river revert to more natural processes. 

Kelsey Cruickshank, the group’s director of policy and government relations, called it “a disappointing development that continues to give short shrift to the incredible ecosystem of the world’s third-largest freshwater river system.”

Editor’s note: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the upper river experienced major floods in 2022, the floods were in 2023. This story has been updated. 

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

New federal law addresses climate extremes and flooding along Mississippi River is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Jerry Boardman doesn’t remember exactly when he started collecting acorns in the fall.

But the thousands upon thousands of them he gathers to share with people working to improve habitat along the Mississippi River makes the 81-year-old resident of De Soto, Wisconsin, a small village between La Crosse and Prairie du Chien, a pretty big deal.

“It’s like a myth or a legend,” Andy Meier, a forester for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who receives a portion of Boardman’s bounty, said of the integral role it plays in his work. “It just has always been that way.”

In reality, Boardman began collecting around the time that the need for acorns — a nut that contains the seed that grows oak trees — was growing critical. For the past few decades, the trees that grow in the Mississippi River floodplain, known as floodplain forests, have been struggling. Although they’re named for their ability to withstand the river’s seasonal flooding, they’ve recently been overwhelmed by higher water and longer-lasting floods.

Overall, forest cover along the stretch of the river from Minnesota down to Clinton, Iowa, decreased by roughly 6% between 1989 and 2010, according to a 2022 report on ecological trends on the upper Mississippi. In the years since, losses in some places have neared 20% — and were particularly acute following a massive flood event in 2019. 

What exactly is driving the excess water isn’t fully fleshed out, but climate change and changes in land use that cause water to run off the landscape faster are likely factors.

The result is mass stretches of dead trees that can no longer perform their functions of providing wildlife habitat, sucking up pollutants that would otherwise run downriver and slowing water during floods.  

Floodplain forests in the lower section of the river are also diminished. The Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, which stretches from where the Ohio and Mississippi rivers meet, in Cairo, Illinois, to the Gulf of Mexico was once almost entirely forest. Today, about 30% of that land is treed.  

Government agencies and various nonprofits are attempting to reverse the forestland decline by planting new trees, and volunteers like Boardman are key to the effort. 

Local is best

Reno Bottoms, a sprawling wetland habitat on the river near Boardman’s hometown of De Soto, is one place where tree die-off has been extensive. Boardman, who has been a commercial fisherman, hunter and trapper on the river for most of his life, called the change in forest cover in recent years “shocking.” To combat it, he puts in about 100 hours a year between August and October gathering acorns from the floodplain in De Soto, Prairie du Chien and La Crosse. 

To maximize his time, Boardman uses a contraption not unlike ones used to pick up tennis balls to scoop up the acorns. One small variety, though, requires one to “get down on your hiney or your knees” to pick them up, he said. For those, he relies on a little grunt work.

The idea is that if the trees that produced the acorns were successful enough at warding off flood damage to drop seeds, those seeds might be similarly resilient if replanted.

Boardman looks for acorns from the bur oak, pin oak and swamp white oak, the latter of which is particularly well suited to the floodplain forest. And the numbers he puts up are impressive — last year, he collected about 130,000; this year, 65,000.

He splits up the total to give to the Army Corps and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, both of which have foresters planting trees to restore floodplain habitat.

“Pretty much everything that Jerry collects, in one way or another, will return to the river,” said Meier, the corps forester.

Last fall, for example, between 20,000 and 30,000 of Boardman’s swamp white oak acorns were scattered near McGregor Lake, a river backwater near Prairie du Chien where the corps is piloting an effort to protect trees from flood inundation by raising the forest floor a few inches.

This spring, Meier said, he was “blown away” by the approximately 1,000 seedlings that had taken root there and begun to sprout.

Having access to Boardman’s acorns is important because it gives the corps the chance to experiment with direct seeding, instead of buying young trees and planting them. Direct seeding is both cheaper and more likely to result in a viable tree because the seed is local.

“When we have an opportunity to get something we know came from the river, we know that it’s adapted to growing there,” Meier said.

Not every community has a Boardman, though, and many organizations doing reforestation work have to shell out for seed or look for options from further afield. 

For example, M&C Forest Seeds, based in Clarendon, Arkansas, pays seed collectors cash for acorns and then re-sells sorted seed to government agencies or nonprofits. M&C contracts with collectors to gather acorns at particular latitudes along the river, which they then market to replanting efforts at similar geographic locations. 

Living Lands and Waters, an Illinois-based environmental organization, uses nurseries to cultivate oaks from the region and distributes more than 150,000 trees annually in three-gallon pots to volunteers or individuals. 

Little by little, through the efforts of various government agencies and nonprofits, it all ends up in the ground. 

For instance, since 2007, Living Lands and Waters has planted more than 2 million trees along waterways in the Mississippi River Basin. The Nature Conservancy, using U.S. Department of Agriculture and other program funds, has reforested about a million acres across Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas in the last 30 years. Much of that acreage was on low-lying farmland prone to flooding that had once been forest.

Volunteers key to planting efforts

Whether collecting seeds or planting them, volunteers like Boardman are key to making the work happen. 

Ev Wick, a fifth grade teacher at De Soto’s Prairie View Elementary, has taken his students out for an acorn-gathering day with Boardman for the past several years. Boardman scouts the best trees ahead of time, Wick said, then the kids get to work. They can pick up between 5,000 and 6,000 in a day, propelled by friendly competitions to see who can collect the most or fill their bucket quickest.

They’re interested when Boardman tells them all the acorns they collect will eventually be planted on the islands they see in the river, Wick said. 

Last October, Living Lands and Water brought together people from groups like the Clean River Advisory Council and the Rock Island County Soil and Water Conservation District to plant oak trees near the Quad Cities. Volunteers planted 85 oak trees in a park by the Mississippi River in Illinois City, Illinois. This event helped restore forests but also provided opportunities for people to learn and connect with nature.

“We get individuals that may have never planted a tree before but want to come out because it sounds like a cool, fun thing,” said Dan Breidenstein, vice president of Living Lands and Water. “Not only did they learn how to plant a tree, but they also learned about these different species that we were doing. Every time they visit that area or drive past that building, they’re connected to the area around them, and that tree’s not going anywhere.” 

Organizers are particularly tickled when young people show up.

“My favorite part of today is being outside and in the environment because I don’t go outside much,” said Brooklyn Wilson, a high school junior who volunteered at the October event. “The most important thing to understand is that as a community we need to be able to come together and help and pick up and do what we need to do to better our environment and neighborhoods.” 

Perhaps some of the young volunteers will follow in Boardman’s footsteps. 

As for Boardman, the chance to donate acorns or otherwise help out is a no-brainer.

“That river has given me so much,” he said. “I’ve just got to give back all I can give.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Disclosure: The Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, The Nature Conservancy and the Clean River Advisory Council receive funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Volunteers collect and plant acorns along Mississippi River to save struggling forests is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Jay Dee Nichols stamped and packed stiff willow branches between maple wood posts, with muffled crunches.

At 63, the semi-retired handyman from the Wisconsin city of Black River Falls has trapped beavers before. But he’s never heard of a mock beaver dam — much less constructed one.

“It gives you an appreciation for what beavers do,” Nichols said over the shrill beeping of a skid loader. A scratch on his forearm oozed blood, drying into a scarlet smudge.

“They’re one of the hardest-working animals out there, I guess.”

Nichols’ muck boots sloshed in a pool of water that already was forming behind the freshly constructed beaver dam analog, or BDA. The semi-porous wooden structures are often installed across streams to redirect water or capture sediment.

Nichols and three other workers were as busy as beavers for a week in October constructing 12 of them in a forested wetland. 

It’s all part of Jim Hoffman’s latest project.

The BDAs span an unnamed, man-made channel that drains overflow from a reservoir on Hoffman’s cranberry farm, north of Alma Center in Jackson County. The water runs into South Fork Halls Creek, a trout stream where actual beavers have taken up residence.

Hoffman, 60, hopes the BDAs, which could pool up to 1.7 acre-feet of water during floods, improve water quality, stabilize eroded stream banks and enhance wildlife habitat. Most of all, he seeks to trailblaze a path through the state’s onerous dam-permitting process so other Wisconsin landowners can follow in his footsteps.

“There’s a lot of different streams and tributaries that could benefit from this,” Hoffman said.

As average Wisconsin temperatures and precipitation increase in response to climate change, scientists, environmentalists and regulators point to the promise of nature-based solutions. 

Enter the beaver.

North America’s largest rodent is infamous for wood munching. Where they chew, wetlands often follow. The natural sponges filter water and offer flood protection.

The U.S. once was home to 60 million to 400 million beavers, which inhabited a range extending from the northern Mexican deserts to the Arctic tundra. But European and American settlers hunted them to near extinction.

As their population dwindled and agriculture and urban development expanded, wetlands disappeared. Wisconsin, like the rest of the country, lost roughly half since the late 1700s.

Without maintenance from nature’s “ecosystem engineers,” many of the nation’s once multi-threaded streams also became single-channeled and incised — disconnected from their floodplains. When this happens, water tables sink, water temperature increases and plants die. If torrential floodwaters funnel through the simple stream systems, they flush out wildlife and wood.

Nature can repair itself, but the process of restoring stream complexity can take millennia. Mock beaver dams can jump-start the process, reducing the timing to mere decades.

They also can slow the flow of runoff and allow watersheds to store more water. Hoffman sees their potential to limit flooding in Wisconsin, potentially saving taxpayer dollars and creating wildlife habitat.

Watershed councils, conservation districts, Indigenous tribes, and state and federal natural resources agencies frequently deploy them in the American West. But their use in Wisconsin, a state with a historically tempestuous relationship with beavers, is novel. Many regulators believe the critters’ dams harm trout, and the state’s fisheries and forestry divisions contract with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to wipe out beavers that live on designated streams.

Fewer than a dozen permitted projects that incorporate BDAs or similar wooden structures have been built in Wisconsin to date. The Department of Natural Resources recently approved two on trout stream tributaries, signaling an openness to test their potential despite concerns from fisheries managers. Construction is underway in other Mississippi River basin states too, including Iowa, Kentucky and Missouri.

Wisconsin regulators generally treat BDAs as dams that impound water, making for an arduous and expensive permitting process. 

Hoffman spent more than a year and $20,000 to obtain his permit. He is the CEO of a vast Wisconsin construction company and has a running joke.

“The one thing you never do is call the DNR and ask them, ‘Do I need a permit for this?’” he said.

What are beaver dam analogs? 

A healthy streamscape requires space for water to slowly meander. That requires messy wood obstructions like fallen trees and debris-filled logjams.

Much like real beaver dams, the analogs obstruct water and disperse the flow across a wider area. Water pools above and below the dams, and upstream surface height increases.

Sediment accumulates behind the obstructions, sometimes transforming an upstream pool into a wetland and eventually a meadow. But nature’s randomness means beaver dams or analogs can fail.

BDAs are not in themselves a solution, experts say, but tools that initiate natural processes that mend degraded waterscapes. 

While their popularity increased in the 2000s, historic drawings indicate that small wicker and log dams were constructed as early as the 19th century to “correct” streams in France.

Construction these days hasn’t changed much, with workers pounding posts directly into a streambed and weaving willow or juniper branches between them. Gaps can be plugged with sediment. The analogs, which are biodegradable and transient, function well when constructed in sequence like natural beaver dam complexes. Proponents hope that using natural materials and hand labor reduces building costs, enabling more miles of restoration.

When human and beaver engineers meet

When Hoffman installed his cranberry marshes more than 20 years ago, a developer taught him an important marketing lesson: christen the business after the resource you are destroying. The developer named his housing division Fox Ridge. Hoffman, in turn, called his cranberry operation Goose Landing.

Yet, in Hoffman’s case, he didn’t necessarily displace geese. Hundreds occupy his reservoir on a given day, leaving droppings that serve as free fertilizer.

The 1,000-acre property serves as a laboratory of earthworks and a wildlife cornucopia. 

Hoffman, a Stanford engineer by training, returned to Wisconsin from San Francisco Bay in 1989 and joined the road construction business his great-grandfather started more than seven decades prior, before the United States had an organized highway system.

After starting the cranberry operation, Hoffman mined frac sand, then obtained his commercial fish farming license. Now, he’s stocked the former mining pits — since filled with water — with an angler’s dream: walleye, hybrid muskie, perch, crappie, bluegill and bass.

Hoffman sped past one of the ponds in his Ford Bronco, pointing out the artificial islands he created. To add vegetation, he grabbed trees by their rootballs and shoved them into the virgin soil.

“I like to change my environment,” he said. “I’m an earthmover by character — by business.”

Hoffman’s efforts to “rewild” his land led him to plant turnip and radish plots for deer along with oak trees to recreate a piece of Wisconsin’s historical savannas. He’s replaced row crops with prairie grass and intends to install an osprey nesting box on one of his ponds — even if it means the birds of prey eat his fish.

Mock beaver dams are Hoffman’s latest push.

His interest in them blossomed after he helped a Nordic skiing buddy release an orphan beaver on his property. They constructed a lodge for the two-year-old rodent, tucking in a stuffed teddy bear to keep it company.

“Well, it instantly swam into the pond, and that was the last we saw it,” Hoffman said.

In a section of forest far from the cranberry marshes, the drainage ditch turns into what appears to be a natural stream, which cuts through steep banks.

On both sides lies what resembles a 3- to 4-foot-tall effigy mound running perpendicular across the creek bed. Hoffman wonders if beavers were the original architects.

“It might be hundreds of years old,” he said. “I’m hoping the beavers come back here and say, ‘Well, we almost got a dam built!’”

Mock beaver dams used out West 

Science backs Hoffman’s belief in the restoration power of beaver dam analogs. In one of the first major studies, researchers evaluated their trout impacts and potential to reverse stream incision.

Bridge Creek, a high-desert watershed in north-central Oregon, bore the signs of livestock overgrazing and beaver removal. Following severe storms, the main channel gradually disconnected from the landscape’s floodplain — conditions that persisted even 20 years after cattle stopped chomping on surrounding vegetation.

The researchers monitored conditions before and after installing more than 130 BDAs in Bridge Creek. They compared those sections of creek to areas that lacked BDAs — some that beavers called home and others they did not.

Prior to the study, Bridge Creek contained some beaver dams, but they frequently blew out during major floods. Sediment didn’t have time to accumulate and reconnect the channel to the landscape.

But the BDAs acted as reinforcements. 

Beaver dams in the study area increased more than sevenfold within the first eight years after the scientists added them.

In the BDA sections, land inundated with water increased by 228% and side channels increased by a whopping 1,216%, considerably more than the Bridge Creek sections that lacked them.

As the analogs rehydrated the aquifer, vegetation increased. Groundwater killed off scrubby plants, such as sagebrush, and water-loving willow trees took root.

Could mock beaver dams block or fry fish? 

The impact of beavers on fish remains a hot topic in Wisconsin. For some, it’s axiomatic that beaver dams block trout passage — a belief with a long history.

But that wasn’t a problem at Bridge Creek.

The researchers tagged about 100,000 juvenile trout, enabling antennas to detect fish movement at specific stream locations. They surveyed the stream for more than a decade.

The scientists determined that the installation of mock beaver dams increased the survival, density and reproduction of juvenile trout. They detected no changes to upstream migration in the tagged trout despite the massive increase in human and beaver-made dams. Several spawners passed through upwards of 200 during their migration.

Other studies conducted in California concluded trout easily cross BDAs, either by jumping or swimming up side passages.

Another objection to beaver dams stems from the belief they invariably increase stream temperature: Beaver ponds increase a stream’s surface area, which is warmed by the sun.

But at Bridge Creek, water temperature remained constant or decreased, even during summer. The researchers suggested that pooled water upstream of the dams percolated into the ground, forcing cool groundwater to upwell downstream and mix with that on the surface. An offset to the sun.

The complexes affected temperatures in other ways. 

On one hand, they buffered water temperatures. Stream temperatures periodically fluctuate with day-night cycles and across seasons, but the mock beaver dams compressed the rises and falls. On the other hand, the complexes created variety, filled with warm and cold spots, offering fish a buffet to choose from.

Some studies have documented downstream warming from the analogs. And others from the upper Midwest have documented increased temperatures below natural beaver dam complexes and in beaver ponds, but academics have questioned the research’s scientific rigor.

Nick Bouwes, a Utah State University faculty member who worked on the Bridge Creek study and co-authored a manual that many consider the BDA bible, agrees that the structures could block fish or raise water temperatures in certain ecosystems in his native Wisconsin.

But until there is solid evidence, he said, ultimately those remain assumptions that should be studied.

“It makes you wonder what fish did 3- or 400 years ago when there was an order of magnitude more beaver and an order of magnitude more fish in these systems,” Bouwes said.

Upholding the public trust

In September, Mike Engel, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, oversaw the installation of beaver dam analogs at Briggs Wetland near Beloit, Wisconsin.

The workshop brought together ecologists, consultants, resource managers and regulators from local, state and federal agencies, most of whom dipped their toes into BDA waters for the first time.

Although passionate about such tools, Engel says beavers and BDAs aren’t a panacea for all degraded wetlands or a warming climate.

“There’s certainly people who will grab a hold of the cute, fuzzy critter and like the idea,” Engel said, standing atop a beaver dam that formed a network of ponds adjacent to the Briggs property. “But I think more people will be interested in managing the amount of water they have — whether they need more or they need less due to climate change.”

In other words, what would a well-functioning watershed look like, and what tools and techniques can achieve those ends? The case for mock beaver dams depends on the setting.

“Out West, they have miles and miles and miles of public land,” said Thomas Nedland, who conducts wetland and waterway permitting with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

If the BDAs fail, “all the water that’s backed up ends up going into the woods or the floodplain” without risk to infrastructure, he said. 

“That’s not quite the setting we have here in Wisconsin.”

Such projects might lead to conflicts with property owners, especially if beavers move in and enlarge the structures. They might swamp adjacent corn fields or flood a road or backyard.

Wisconsin’s public trust doctrine also requires regulators to consider the public’s access to natural resources when making permitting decisions. The Department of Natural Resources may impose requirements to maintain the rights to boat, swim and fish, even on artificial ditches that are considered navigable waterways.

Hoffman’s project rang alarm bells for the local county conservationist, who fears the BDAs will attract beavers to the area, leaving floods and unfishable streams in their wake.

Getting the dam permit 

State regulators must consider many factors in considering a beaver dam analog.

Throwing some sticks across a streambed is relatively simple, but several Wisconsin installations have relied upon consultants, federal workers or nonprofit organizations to navigate permitting.

“They’re really important devices. They have a lot of functionality. They’re very simple and inexpensive to install,” said Hoffman’s contractor, Clay Frazer, a restoration ecologist. 

“And they’re way too complicated to permit right now for the average person.”

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources required Hoffman to conduct hydrologic modeling and topographic surveying before regulators approved his BDAs, which stand roughly 3 feet high.

To satisfy regulators that the analog wouldn’t overturn when water pooled behind it, he had to load test the wooden posts.

Joel Pennycamp, a Hoffman Construction Company employee, strapped a scale around the top of one. Hoffman stood on the streambank holding onto the end of a neon orange string that stretched across the BDA. When Pennycamp tugged, each post could move no more than an inch. 

Analog proponents say the rigid requirements to build transient structures unnecessarily increase costs and dampen enthusiasm to use nature-based solutions for landscape repair. A potentially laborious permitting process also misses the broader point that process-based riverscape restoration is unpredictable.

“You don’t have to be an engineer. You don’t have to be able to operate large machinery. You’re not going to completely redesign a stream to what you think it should be,” Bouwes said. “Let the stream figure it out.”

One permitting difficulty stems from, in several instances, the state’s classification of the porous structures as dams. Regulators and applicants debate a principle point: Does a mock beaver dam actually impound water or, as researchers say, merely slow or delay it? State employees say they lack latitude to interpret because BDAs, plain and simple, fit the legal definition.

“I often hear back from applicants and they’re like, ‘Well, it’s not very big,’ or, ‘It’s not intended to be there for long,’ or whatever,” said Uriah Monday, a state dam safety engineer. “But they always acknowledge that they need that pool of water to create the energy it’s going to take to do whatever they’re trying to achieve.”

For instance, he said, a raised pool of water is necessary to saturate wetlands, carve stream meanders and trap sediment upstream.

Hoffman’s stream tributary may be artificial, but the state still considers its waters navigable and thus protected. Normally, when dams obstruct public passage, the Department of Natural Resources requires the posting of a portage route. 

For now, the agency isn’t requiring it, but Hoffman hopes to run with the idea.

“So I’m having some signs made up for the beavers in case they get confused when they’re swimming upstream and hit the dam,” he said, grinning widely.

The department also has authorized BDAs through a streamlined general permitting process. Hoffman’s mock beaver dams, however, did not meet the criteria to qualify.

“I don’t blame the DNR for it,” he said. “It’s just that they don’t have a system to accommodate our request.” 

Kyle Magyera, who performs government outreach with the Wisconsin Wetlands Association, believes regulators should carve out exceptions from the dam rules. 

Monday thinks the existing permitting system can work, as it already has, and will ease as the department learns more about the structures. That will include monitoring at Briggs Wetland and Goose Landing.

“We’re actually hopeful too,” Nedland said. “If there’s an efficient, cost-effective way for people to do these kinds of projects in a much easier way that results in less disturbance to the landscape, like boy, that’s a win.”

BDA permitting challenges are not unique to Wisconsin. Even the Bridge Creek researchers were unable to conduct a follow-up round of restoration due to regulatory hurdles.

“It seems like every state, you have to go through the growing pains of getting people familiar with these approaches,” Bouwes said. “When they see what we’re actually doing — we’re throwing sticks in the stream to slow the water down — they become a lot more comfortable with it.”

Balancing human and beaver needs

By mid-afternoon at Hoffman’s farm, evidence of the day’s construction littered the ground adjacent to the channel where the BDAs stood: empty plastic Powerade bottles, gasoline cans, a chainsaw.

Before getting off work for the day, Nichols and Pennycamp loaded it onto a utility vehicle. Hoffman, meanwhile, browsed through a printout of his state-issued permit, reviewing the details through reading glasses he perched across his nose.

“‘The water is a cool-cold headwater. The proposed dam will not result in significant adverse effects on this resource upon compliance with the conditions in the order,’” he read aloud. “In other words, don’t flood too much, don’t warm the water up too much. Okay, well we’ll debate that later.”

He flipped the page.

The beavers living at Hoffman’s farm are dispersing across the property. One colony chewed down some of his pines and aspens and plugged a culvert, expanding the shoreline as part of a project Hoffman didn’t plan.

It doesn’t bother him because he has more trees to spare and wants to live among the rodents, but he doesn’t begrudge beaver-bothered people. The critters create profound impacts.

Humans and beavers share a common drive to engineer their environment to live. 

“We’ve got to find a way to balance the different needs of each species,” Hoffman said. “You know, us included.”

Why is he doing all this? Permitting, pounding, portage-routing. Really, why bother?

Hoffman’s campaign is more than just a new permitting process. It’s an exhortation to the state to reconsider its treatment of beavers. If he can show that mock beaver dams don’t heat the water or block fish, perhaps the state will stop removing beavers and their dams from trout streams.

“We’re going to hopefully show to them that the beavers in the ecosystem are actually beneficial,” Hoffman said.

Going through the trouble is simply part of a kindred ecosystem engineer’s balancing act.

This story was produced in partnership with the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network, of which Wisconsin Watch is a member. It was also reported with support from the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems. Sign up for Wisconsin Watch’s newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

An ecosystem engineer’s vision: mock beaver dams to restore Wisconsin wetlands is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Early on Election Day, highways in the St. Louis area were inundated with water. Over several days, intense storms battered Missouri, bringing six to 10 inches of rain — record-breaking amounts for November.

The flash flooding killed at least five people, including two older poll workers whose vehicle was swept from a state highway.

Mayors along the Mississippi River have watched for years as intensifying rain storms and flooding wreak havoc on their communities.

Take Grafton, Illinois, which escaped Election Day flash flooding but suffered $160,000 to $170,000 in damages from a heavy rain event in July. The town’s main intersection was blocked with logs and debris, and the storm blew out a water line and left streets in need of repair.

But Grafton never received a federal disaster declaration and was not eligible for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Instead, it paid for road and water line repairs through its Department of Public Works’ annual budget. As a result, the city could no longer purchase new trucks for snow plowing this year, as it had planned.

“What it means is that we’ll limp through another year, keep the vehicles running,” said Grafton Mayor Michael Morrow, who oversees the $1.2 million annual budget for the small riverfront city of about 600.

River communities have suffered repeated losses. But federal disaster funding can take weeks, months or even years to pay out. Traditional insurance programs are tied to property and require proof of loss for a payout, which can be burdensome and lengthy to assemble. 

So this fall, the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative (MRCTI) announced a new insurance pilot, with hopes of better helping river towns recover. 

MRCTI, which represents 105 cities in 10 states in the Mississippi River Basin, including Wisconsin, is working with Munich Re, a German multinational insurance company, to create the insurance product. 

The resulting pilot will test a novel type of insurance pool — called parametric insurance — that is designed to rapidly fund emergency response after natural disasters such as flooding. 

Pilot will test usefulness of new ‘parametric’ insurance policies

The likely cause of intensifying rainfall and floods is human-caused climate change, according to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a scientific report created every four years for the United States Congress and the president, to help explain the impacts, risks and vulnerabilities associated with a changing global climate.

In 2019, communities in the Basin saw months of flooding, spanning across the Mississippi, Missouri and Arkansas rivers. Reported losses totaled almost $25 billion across at least 17 states, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The central U.S. is emerging as a new flash flooding hotspot, according to research published in Nature’s Communications Earth & Environment journal. With its new role as a hotspot comes more disaster damage – and need for insurance that addresses that.

While conventional indemnity insurance requires insured owners to prove specific losses by amassing evidence and presenting pre-storm documentation, parametric insurance pays out quickly after agreed-upon “triggers” – such as wind speeds or river heights – reach a certain level. 

For the MRCTI pilot, Munich Re has suggested using watershed data from the U.S. Geological Survey to determine the best gauges along the river to measure flood depth. Once the river flooding reaches a certain depth, the payout would be triggered. 

Getting that trigger right is key, said Kathy Baughman McLeod, chief executive officer of Climate Resilience for All, a nonprofit focused on climate adaptation.

“You want to have sufficient understanding of how you set the triggers at a certain place and why,” she said. “There’s a lot of engagement necessary to get everybody on the same page about what the product is, how it works, what the trigger should be.”

The goal of Munich Re’s pilot program is to demonstrate in real time how a parametric insurance payout policy would function in current insurance market conditions and how swift payouts could better assist a city’s disaster response in the immediate days following a flood.

First, Munich Re will develop a mock-up of the insurance policy for one hazard – flooding – with the understanding that multiple hazards, like intense heat, or drought, could be added later, said Colin Wellenkamp, executive director of MRCTI and, as of Nov. 6, a newly elected state representative for Missouri District 105. 

The mock-up would calculate a range of premium costs and theoretical payout options that would be available for cities of varying sizes along the river. But the pilot won’t cost the cities a cent – and it won’t pay them anything either, until the pilot moves into implementation. It’s unclear which entities will ultimately foot the bill of the pilot and eventual product because it’s so early in development.

When Munich Re moves into implementation, individual city governments would hold the policies and receive payouts. Wellenkamp hopes to convince larger corporations that rely on a healthy and functioning Mississippi River hydrology to pick up the tab on the premiums, he said. 

Quick payouts could take burdens off cities

“In the first 24 to 72 hours after a disaster event, very little money can help a whole heck of a lot,” Wellenkamp said. “We use that time for evacuations and to move people out of additional harm’s way in the aftermath.”

But soon after the initial emergency response, municipalities start to look for funds for longer-term cleanup and repair. Under the current paradigm, that money can be hard to tap.  

In the spring of 2019, major flooding on the Mississippi inundated many communities, including Grafton, where the downtown partially closed and people were forced to evacuate. 

The Trump administration didn’t declare a major disaster until September of that year, months after flood waters had receded. It took until 2022 for federal money to reach Grafton, Morrow said.

“The former administration went through that flood,” Morrow said. “I’m the mayor now, and I was getting some of the money that they had put in years ago.”

That wait places stress on a city’s finances, especially smaller ones like Grafton, Morrow added. 

Traditional insurance doesn’t always help either. Grafton has a flood policy, but it only covers property owned by the city. Residents and businesses in the community would need to take out their own flood protection. The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which underwrites many flood insurance policies, has various coverage restrictions. For example, NFIP doesn’t cover roads or wastewater infrastructure. 

The policies also require proof of loss before issuing a check because they cover specific damage, like to a particular building or its contents. This “proof” can take days to document, and longer to process, which delays how fast a local government can begin repairs. Without proper pre-storm documentation, damage can sometimes be nearly impossible to prove.

Parametric insurance – which works with measurable triggers and isn’t tied to documentable losses – could ease the process. 

Cities from the headwaters to the mouth of the Mississippi could buy into the policy, creating a pool that spreads out the risk that any individual community faces. 

“Not every city is going to flood every year, but the flooding will impact at least one section of the river,” said Raghuveer Vinukollu, head of climate insights and advisory for  Munich Re in the U.S.

The insurance pool would protect a town from the risk of ruin, and a more timely payout would increase the town’s resiliency through swift reinvestment in its infrastructure, he added.

Parametric insurance in the Mississippi Delta and beyond

For flooding on rivers, this kind of insurance risk pool is new territory, Vinukollu said. As climate risks become more extreme, the insurance industry is working with a number of communities to address their evolving needs, he said.

While parametric insurance is still developing, one early example stands out to Vinukollu — the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF).

CCRIF pools risk for Caribbean countries, which face hurricane risks each year. By pooling risk together each island can receive a larger payout than if it had taken out an individual policy. 

In July, a mere 14 days after Hurricane Beryl devastated 90% of buildings and agriculture on the islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique, the government of Grenada received its first payout from CCRIF to fund disaster recovery. 

The tropical cyclone policy paid more than $42 million to Grenada, the largest single payout from CCRIF since its inception in 2007.

In the Mississippi River Basin, Vinukollu hopes to apply this kind of shared risk pool to insure cities at risk for inland flooding. 

“The triggers are different, the perils are different, but the concept is the same,” said Vinukollu.

Given its position near the end of the Mississippi River, New Orleans is no stranger to the devastating impacts of extreme weather. Several city-run institutions, such as NOLA Public Schools, have taken out parametric insurance policies to protect important infrastructure. 

One of the first tests of these policies came in September when Hurricane Francine’s storm surge, rain and winds pelted southern Louisiana. 

But NOLA Public Schools did not receive a payout from its policy with Swiss Re. 

While wind speeds were high, they were not high enough to meet the policy’s triggers of more than 100 miles per hour for one minute.

New Orleans is more likely to experience repetitive, severe losses from named storms than a city in the upper Basin, such as Minneapolis, so cities closer to the Gulf Coast may end up paying higher premiums once the policy officially rolls out, said Wellenkamp, of MRCTI.

Cities that choose to cover more hazards or lower-level disasters may pay higher premiums because it could result in more frequent payouts, Wellenkamp said. Ultimately, municipalities could still end up footing the bill for events like the July flooding in Grafton or the Election Day storms in St. Louis.

McLeod, of Climate Resilience for All, argues communities shouldn’t expect payouts from parametric insurance all that often. “Just by the nature of the product it shouldn’t (pay every year),” she said. “Insurance is for the worst of the worst.”

Munich Re advises that parametric insurance works best to complement – not replace – traditional insurance policies. But company officials believe that these new policies offer the chance for insurance to adapt to changing risk landscapes, as weather events become more extreme.

Despite its potential to facilitate faster disaster response, parametric insurance is no silver bullet, said McLeod. 

The best solution to her is reducing the underlying risk from climate change. 

“The big picture is it’s a really important tool in financing and managing the risks of climate change, and we need every tool,” she said. 

But more than any new financial tool, McLeod said, the most effective financial step would be addressing the root causes of climate change, and building – or rebuilding – more natural protections, like wetlands.

“You’ve got to reduce the risk (or) you won’t be able to afford the insurance on it,” she said. “It’s not insurance if you know this thing is going to happen.”

The Lens’ Marta Jewson contributed reporting to this story.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Mississippi River towns pilot new insurance model to help with disaster response is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

It was just before sunset on the Mississippi River, the day’s last bits of golden light dancing on the water, when four members of the band Big Blue Sky picked up their instruments for one of their defining songs.

During the summer, the group plays Friday nights for Maiden Voyage Tours, a northeast Iowa riverboat company. Its 40-some passengers that evening had been sharing bottles of wine and hearing tales of Mississippi River history as they cruised along, speedboats occasionally racing by on either side.

Then the boat captain pulled over to an island and cut the motor. It was time for the water song.

Moving and unforgettable, “Water Song” urges listeners to think about how they treat the natural resource, so vital for life on Earth. The tune was written in 2015 and came together in minutes, recalled Big Blue Sky singers and songwriters Jon Stravers and Sophia Landis. Much of the group’s music is about the river and the surrounding region, a place of curiosity, adventure and solace for Stravers and his late son, Jon-Jon.

Big Blue Sky’s work adds to a centuries-long tradition of music inspired and transported by the Mississippi River. The river’s role as a major shipping artery and a force of nature, as well as its historical and cultural significance to the nation, make it an easy thing to write about. And riverboats not altogether different from this one carried songs north and south, spreading jazz and the Delta blues across the heart of the country.

Most importantly, the music describes people’s personal connections to the river — something intensely evident in Stravers’ words on the boat.

In song, he and Landis rhapsodized. In speaking, he kept it simple: “This is a good stretch of the river. It’s important. And people love it.”

Mississippi River moved and shaped jazz, Delta blues

Perhaps no style of music is as intertwined with the Mississippi River as the Delta blues, rooted in the musical traditions of enslaved Black Americans who were forced to work long hours in the fields of the Mississippi Delta region. Though slavery had technically ended, many Black Americans remained in unfair and oppressive working conditions at the turn of the 20th century.

Unlike gospel music sung in church, blues reflected their real lives and real feelings, said Maie Smith, group tour manager and operations manager at the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

“Delta blues music is a music that works from the heart to the outside,” Smith said. “It starts with your most inner being and helps to lift you up and rise you above whatever circumstances you were in.”

Lots of Delta blues musicians worked on the river, Smith said, including those forced to build levees to protect fields from floodwaters. They endured the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, which killed upwards of a thousand people and displaced almost 640,000 people from Illinois to Louisiana. Many songs were written about this historic disaster and other river floods, including Charley Patton’s “High Water Everywhere,” Barbecue Bob’s “Mississippi Heavy Water Blues,” Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues” and Big Bill Broonzy’s “Southern Flood Blues.”

But the river also provided opportunities for blues musicians to travel, taking their songs with them. Blues and later jazz music came north to Memphis, Kansas City and Chicago, building a following and mixing with other music styles. Today, blues riffs underpin much of American popular music, Smith said, like rock and roll and hip hop.

Music was moving on the Mississippi even before then — during the so-called “golden age of steamboats” in the 19th century. Thousands of steamboats traveled the river and its major tributaries during that time, said Steve Marking, a river historian and guest performer for American Cruise Lines on its Mississippi River cruises.

The boats took on passengers as well as freight, and companies sought to hire the best musicians to entice people to pay to board, Marking said. Later, even influential jazz musician Louis Armstrong performed for a few years on the Streckfus Steamboat Line.

Other forms of music that arose and were popularized on the river include ragtime in St. Louis and river folk music that featured banjo, fiddle and percussion. Dixieland, a form of jazz, and country music also owe a debt to the river. 

Why capture the Mississippi River in song?

Rivers in general “have inspired almost as many songs as love,” Marking said.

Many people have some sort of connection with them, whether it’s traveling them by boat or simply watching them run. Marking pointed to the song “Watchin’ the River Go By,” by John Hartford, which depicts two people who get together each night on the porch to watch the Ohio River. It’s an experience anyone, young or old, can relate to, he said (well, maybe not completely — the people in the song do so in the nude).

But more than lakes, forests or prairies, rivers are captured in song over and over again. Why?

It could be their heavy symbolism. For Marking, rivers signify the passage of time, reminding us of our journey through life.

“If you’re standing on the shore,” he said, “upstream is the past, downstream is the future.”

Rivers also make a connection — between places, or even between the past and the future.

The musicians who still travel the river today are helping make that connection, Marking said, including the ones who make up Big Blue Sky. He described taking the boat tour and listening to them play “Water Song” as “one of the top five events of my entire life.”

It’s easy to see why. The group’s music both honors the river’s musical traditions and adds something new: an eye toward its ecological importance. In between songs, passengers got to hear about Stravers’ decades of bird research on this stretch of the river, including monitoring of the cerulean warbler, one of the rarest nesting warblers in Iowa. They stopped to watch a beaver on an island waddle through the sand to make his way back to the water. And they were granted what the captain called one of the best sunsets of the summer: a bright, show-stopping pink.

Though most of their songs evolve over time, Stravers said, “Water Song” pretty much gets played the same every time. The exception is in his echo to Landis’s main melody, where he regularly inserts the name of whatever water body they’re playing on to remind listeners they need it to live.

Sacred Mississippi River water, indeed.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Rollin’ on the river: How the Mississippi flows through song and still inspires today is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

The Sny Magill Unit of Effigy Mounds National Monument near Clayton, Iowa, is a hidden wonder.

A dozen miles downstream from the park’s visitor center along the Mississippi River, the path starts with a turn you might miss if you’re not looking closely. Follow that path under a railroad bridge to a boat landing, then go by foot through the woods until the floodplain opens out flat in front of you, revealing more than 100 sacred mounds built by Native Americans thousands of years ago.

These ceremonial and burial mounds are one of the densest collections still existing in North America. It’s clear the people who built them had a special connection to the river valley cradled between the bluffs of the Driftless region and wanted to add their own features to it, said park superintendent Susan Snow.

Today, though, that river has significantly eroded the bank they built on, eating away at some of the mounds at the water’s edge.

It’s a product both of climate change, which is causing wetter conditions across the upper Midwest, and engineered alterations to the river’s flow. There’s now an urgent need to protect the mounds from further damage, Snow said. A multimillion-dollar bank stabilization project proposed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could accomplish that.

Since mounds should not be rebuilt by modern hands, once they’re gone, they’re gone, said Sunshine Thomas Bear, tribal historic preservation officer for the Winnebago Nation of Nebraska, who are descended from the mound builders.

“All we can do is try to save what we can,” she said.

Fast-flowing Mississippi River causing mound erosion

Nineteen tribal nations are affiliated with the mounds that make up the Sny Magill Unit, including the Ho-Chunk Nation, which has a strong presence in Wisconsin.

“The area itself is part of our homeland,” Bear said. “Our connection to these lands goes back thousands of years.”

Bear said the area around Effigy Mounds National Monument used to have more ancient Indigenous mounds, but many were destroyed in the last 150 years by developers as towns were built. And many other mounds were destroyed in the last century by amateur archaeologists who desecrated the burial mounds and stole artifacts and human remains.

Most of the approximately 106 mounds that are part of the Sny Magill Unit are conical — or round — which are likely burial mounds, said Sheila Oberreuter, the park’s museum technician. Others are effigy mounds taking the shapes of birds and bears. It’s likely that ancient people returned to the area for hundreds, if not thousands, of years for mound building during the Woodland period, Oberreuter said, which occurred between 2,500 and 900 years ago.

Because it is low-lying, the land on which the mounds were built floods seasonally when the Mississippi floods. Sometimes, the mounds themselves are completely underwater, Oberreuter said — something that would seem unbelievable while walking among them, if not for visible high-water marks on nearby trees.

The serene backwater adjacent to the mounds is connected to the Mississippi River’s main channel by Johnson Slough. In recent decades, more water has rushed through the slough and hit the river bank, which Snow estimated has eroded the bank by five to 10 feet since the 1940s.

That’s happening in part because of the construction of the lock and dam system on the upper Mississippi River during the 1930s, which transformed the way the river ran to make shipping easier. By converting the free-flowing river into a series of pools, the lock and dam system causes consistent high water levels in some areas. On top of that, heavier rainfall and more severe, longer-lasting flooding events driven by climate change caused more water to move through the upper Mississippi in the last few decades.

Notes from park staff as early as the 1980s mention mound erosion, Snow said, with the first project proposed to stop it in 1994. Wooden support beams were placed along the bank, but were washed out. Reinforcing those beams didn’t work either. In 2022, large logs made of coconut fiber were placed along the parts of the bank experiencing the worst erosion. The following spring, the river saw near-record flooding, and many of those logs were swept from the bank immediately.

Army Corps project would stabilize bank with 2,000-foot rock berm

As park staff considered a more permanent solution, they were approached by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has managed the Mississippi River for decades and recently unlocked a new pool of money that funds ecosystem improvements along the river in addition to improvements to navigation for shipping.

The Navigation and Ecosystem Sustainability Program, or NESP, as it’s commonly called, also supports the protection of cultural resources along the river, said Jill Bathke, lead planner of the program. The Sny Magill project would be the first to access it for that protection.

After consulting with tribal officials, the Army Corps put forth a proposed fix: a 2,000-foot-long berm the height of the floodplain, made of large rocks. The corps would place sand scraped out of the main channel behind the rock wall as an added barrier between the water and the mounds. The berm would be designed with current and future climate conditions in mind, Bathke said, a long-term solution to stop the erosion.

Bear and other members of her tribe are serving as consultants on the project, as are William Quackenbush, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Ho-Chunk Nation in Wisconsin, and his tribe. They also lead teams of volunteers to help care for the mounds, including removing invasive European plants and replacing them with native plants that reduce soil erosion.

Some are skeptical of this manmade solution to a manmade problem. There are some tribal partners who’ve expressed that the river should be allowed to keep flowing as it wants to, Oberreuter said. Snow also acknowledged that people have been hesitant about making such a change to the natural bank.

But, she pointed out, “the bank is (already) no longer what it was.”

Construction of the rock berm should begin in 2026. As they build, they’ll have to take care not to harm a population of federally protected freshwater mussels that live buried in the sand at the river bottom. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the land around the Sny Magill Unit and Johnson Slough as part of the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, will help with that.

When the berm is complete, Snow said, there’ll be a trail atop it that visitors can walk. That may help protect the mounds better than the current way to see them, which is to walk among them, she said.

The Sny Magill Unit has been part of Effigy Mounds National Monument since 1962, Snow said, but it’s not advertised like the rest of the park. That’s in part because there are no staff stationed there to properly guide people through the mounds. But if people visit respectfully, she believes it’s one of the best places to take in the mounds because it’s on a flat, walkable surface, unlike the rest of the park, which is on a blufftop.

For Bear, that education is key to the mounds’ survival. She believes many of those who visit leave with a better understanding of the mounds, and why they need to be protected.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

The Mississippi River is eroding sacred Indigenous mounds in Iowa and Wisconsin is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Sheldon Auto Wrecking is a local institution in southwestern Wisconsin’s Vernon County. It’s tucked in a lush valley just downstream of a 50-foot earthen dam, locally known as “Maple Dale.” 

The salvage yard, which buys used vehicles and farm machinery in this rural area to sell for parts, has been in business for nearly 70 years. For most of those years, the dam — less than a half-mile up the road — has protected its yard of hundreds of old cars and broken-down equipment from frequent and sometimes severe flooding in the area.

The dam “was put in place for a reason,” said owner Greg Sheldon.

But it might soon go away. 

Maple Dale is one of thousands of dams constructed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, beginning in the mid-20th century, for the purposes of flood control. 

In 2018, five similar dams in the region failed during a massive rainstorm that caused property damage in the tens of millions of dollars. A study determined that several other dams in the watersheds hit hardest by the flood, including Maple Dale, were also vulnerable to failure but would be too expensive to replace. 

As a result, local officials are voting on whether to dismantle the dams by cutting large notches in them, allowing the water to flow again, in a process called decommissioning. Experts say it could be the most dams ever decommissioned in a single county in the U.S. 

And it could be a harbinger for other communities.

Although the county may be the first to take on a project of this size, it’s unlikely to be the last. Dams across the country are aging and also facing pressures from urban sprawl and intensifying floods wrought by climate change. The price tag to fix what’s broken, though, is estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars, meaning dam owners could face hard questions about what to do with them. 

In Viroqua, it’s also leaving the people who own property below the dams uneasy about what comes next — including Sheldon.

“To come along and just rip a big hole out and let the water run is a mistake,” he said.

Removal plan controversial

The southwest Wisconsin dams are among nearly 12,000 that have been built under the USDA’s Watershed Programs. Generally smaller and set in rural agricultural areas, they’re mostly clustered from the center of the country eastward. Oklahoma has the most, followed by Texas, Iowa and Missouri. 

The idea for the watershed program dams arose during the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. Because there was little vegetation left on the landscape to soak up rain when it fell, there were several severe floods during that time, prompting federal agencies to look for a way to control the water. 

To get the dams built, the Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a contract with a local sponsor, such as a county. NRCS covered all the construction costs and helped the sponsor with inspections and repairs. In return, the sponsor maintained the dam for a certain number of years — under most contracts, 50 — to ensure taxpayers got their money’s worth out of the project. 

Since many of the dams were built in the 1960s and 1970s, their contracts are now up, said Steve Becker, Wisconsin’s state conservation engineer for NRCS.

“We pretty much told the counties, ‘You have full autonomy to do whatever you want with those dams,” Becker said. “You can maintain, you can rehab, you can repair. It doesn’t really matter. We’re out.’” 

When the Wisconsin dams failed, however, local officials enlisted the help of NRCS to figure out what to do. The agency launched a study of all the dams in the watersheds and found that, while they’d controlled flooding over the last few decades, they fared much worse under future modeling because of their age and projected increases in heavy rainfall. Because the cost to replace them was too steep, NRCS recommended taking them out of service, on the federal government’s dime. 

In Vernon County, home to the majority of the dams examined in the study, that plan has been controversial. 

Garrick Olerud is treasurer of the Snowflake Ski Club in Westby, which is below three of the dams that are set to be dismantled. The club has had to spend “a lot” of money over the past decade fixing flood damage to the ski jump and the golf course on the property, Olerud said — and that’s with the protection of the dams. 

“When you remove those dams, I guess I have big, big concerns about the long-term effects it’ll have,” he said. “I’m not an expert, but I don’t believe that the course or the ski jump will continue to … have the financial means to build back after stuff gets washed away.” 

To others, leaving the dams in place risks a bigger catastrophe if more of them fail during a storm.

“When (the dams) work, they work, but when they go out, it’s 10 times worse than a regular flood,” Frank Easterday, a member of the Vernon County Board, said during an Aug. 15 meeting. 

At the meeting, the board voted to accept federal funding from NRCS so the agency can move forward with decommissioning. Nearby La Crosse and Monroe counties, which have a handful of such dams between them, have followed suit. 

Aging dams, climate threats make for ‘perfect storm’ 

Threats to America’s dam infrastructure were thrust into the spotlight in June when the Rapidan dam in southern Minnesota partially failed, pushed to its limit by days of historic flooding across the upper Midwest. 

In the American Society of Civil Engineers’ latest Infrastructure Report Card, released in 2021, the group gave the nations’ more than 91,000 dams a “D.” That’s largely because of their age — the average age of a dam in the U.S. is over 60 years old, said Del Shannon, the lead author of that section of the report card. 

As residential development has sprawled nationally, some dams that once posed little risk to human life if they failed are now a bigger threat. 

On top of that, climate change is leaving question marks about how dams will perform under new weather conditions. Precipitation, for example, increased 5 to 15% across the Midwest during 1992 to 2021, compared with the 1901-1960 average. That’s largely driven by intensifying rainfalls.  

To date, almost 6,600 of the watershed program dams will have completed their contracts, according to an NRCS spokesperson. In the next five years, that number will rise to 7,383. That means many more places like Vernon County will have decisions to make about how — and whether — to keep them up. 

In 2015, now-retired NRCS watershed program engineer Larry Caldwell warned in a memo that a “perfect storm” of problems with watershed dams could put people and property at risk. He outlined seven such problems: These dams are everywhere across the nation, downstream landscapes have filled in since they were constructed, they’re getting old, climate change is bringing more extreme weather, limited funds for repairs, loss of institutional knowledge about the dams, and the fact that the failure of smaller dams can — and have — killed people. 

“Any one condition is cause for concern. The presence of two or three would be cause for alarm,” Caldwell wrote. “But all seven are occurring simultaneously which will eventually create a crisis for many communities.” 

Properly maintained dams can continue doing their job “well beyond” their contracts, the NRCS spokesperson said. Still, understanding the proper path forward for an individual dam can be challenging because all dams are unique, Shannon said. 

What’s more, there’s not a good understanding of how long these kinds of dams can function, a gap Shannon called “astonishing and embarrassing.” He’ll take part in a forthcoming study that seeks to give dam owners broad information about when dam parts start to show wear — like crumbling concrete spillways or corroded metal gates — and when to think about repairing, replacing or charting another course. 

High price tag for dam rehab means other solutions may be necessary 

Another hurdle in the quest for better dam infrastructure: cost. The Association of State Dam Safety Officials, which works to improve dam safety through professional development and lobbying, estimates the cost to fix non-federal dams, which make up the vast majority of the nation’s dams, at $157.5 billion. 

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, passed in 2021, provided somewhat of a shot in the arm: $3 billion was earmarked for dam safety, including $118 million for the rehabilitation of the USDA watershed program dams. An NRCS spokesperson said that money paid for 118 dam projects across the nation, many clustered in the southern and eastern U.S.

Shannon said he views it as a down payment, but more funding is obviously needed. The southwest Wisconsin dams, for example, would cost a few million dollars apiece to replace, Becker estimated — racking up close to $100 million just for one small region. 

“What can we afford to do? We can afford to notch them out,” Becker said. “If some big benefactor came in and said, ‘23 dams times $3.5 million? We can help pay for that,’ we’d re-evaluate.” 

Although recent federal funding will move the needle, looking at the total cost can be depressing, said Lori Spragens, executive director of the Association of State Dam Safety Officials — particularly when remembering that dams are aging every day. She called it a “one step forward, two steps back” situation and said there’s an urgent need to make progress. 

“I think we are going to see more dams under stress, or even failing,” Spragens said. “It’s not really fun to look at in the future.” 

Amid these challenges, there’s growing interest in natural solutions to reduce the impact of floodwaters in place of built infrastructure. Moving away from areas that flood often and using farming practices that help the land hold on to water, instead of allowing it to run downstream, could help. 

The community in Vernon County recognizes that. 

“With or without the dams, flooding is going to be a huge challenge in this community,” county conservationist Ben Wojahn told the board during the Aug. 15 meeting. “Decommissioning these dams is not the end … keeping the dams would not be the end.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

The fate of thousands of US dams hangs in the balance, leaving rural communities with hard choices is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

The farmworkers scattered.

There was a union representative in the workers’ employer-provided housing, on an orchard in upstate New York. Their employer, major apple grower Porpiglia Farms, had hired them on H-2A, or temporary labor, visas. That day in August 2023, according to the workers’ union, United Farm Workers, the orchard’s owners burst in. The farmworkers ran or hid in their rooms.

Following the incident, the UFW filed a complaint with New York state, alleging the orchard prevented workers from exercising their rights. Porpiglia Farms disputed the UFW’s account and said it is working with the UFW. However, on that day, the UFW organizer had “trespassed” in an effort to “gin up a controversy,” Anthony Porpiglia, the owner, said in a statement provided to Investigate Midwest by his attorneys. The workers “asked her to leave and she refused,” he said.

The following summer, workers arrived for harvest season. Near the orchard’s entrance, workers, whose union has endorsed Kamala Harris for president, noticed a new sign: “Farmers for Trump.”

The scuffle in the orchard epitomizes the division on immigration between the two presidential candidates and what could be at stake for immigrant workers, who have underpinned the agriculture industry for decades. While Donald Trump’s rhetoric targets its workforce, the industry, writ large, has favored the former president. President Joe Biden’s administration, with Kamala Harris as vice president, has instituted protections paving a path to more farmworker unionization, while also cracking down on border crossings.

A Harris victory would likely mean a continuation of Biden’s efforts — and renewed hope for a path to citizenship for undocumented farmworkers. She’s publicly supported one for years. But farmworkers, who are essential to the U.S. economy, will still fear being uprooted regardless of who is president, said Laurie Beyranevand, director of the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law and Graduate School.

“At the end of the day, many farmworkers still fear deportation,” she said. “Obviously, that fear, I think, is more pronounced with a policy agenda like the Trump administration, but it’s not as though it’s not present with the Biden administration either.” 

Neither campaign responded to a request for comment on their immigration stances.

If re-elected, Trump has promised to deport upwards of 20 million undocumented people, many of them agricultural workers who perform the dangerous jobs most Americans don’t want. Trump supported the use of the H-2A program, which farmers said is necessary to fill labor shortages. But the former president’s close allies have recently proposed eliminating it.

Agriculture corporations have lavished Trump and Republicans with campaign cash. The disparity in spending on conservatives and liberals, in conservatives’ favor, increased during the Trump administration. Rural areas, a proxy for farmers, largely voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020.

In an interview with The New York Times, Stephen Miller, who led Trump’s immigration efforts during his administration, said the Trump campaign’s goal was to upend industries that rely on immigrant labor. 

“Mass deportation will be a labor-market disruption celebrated by American workers, who will now be offered higher wages with better benefits to fill these jobs,” he said.

Some research suggests deportations, especially at a large scale, could backfire on U.S. workers. In 2023, University of Colorado researchers estimated that, for every 1 million unauthorized workers deported, 88,000 native workers would lose jobs. When companies lose their labor forces, the researchers concluded, they find ways to use less labor, not replace their lost workers.

A historical example is the end of the Bracero Program, which allowed Mexican workers into the U.S. for seasonal jobs. Instead of hiring more U.S. workers when their labor force was suddenly gone, farmers turned to heavy machinery, according to 2017 research. There was no corresponding increase in employment or wages for native workers.

Temporary labor visa programs have exploded in popularity. In 2023, the government granted about 400,000 H-2A visas. But America’s farms still depend on an undocumented workforce. Out of about 2 million farmworkers in the U.S., government surveys show about 44% are undocumented. (Hundreds of thousands of other workers in the food supply chain — meatpacking plants, grocery stores, restaurants — are also undocumented.)

“If we lost half of the farmworker population in a short period of time, the agriculture sector would likely collapse,” said Mary Jo Dudley, the director of the Cornell Farmworker Program. “There are no available skilled workers to replace the current workforce should this policy be put into place.”

Antonio De Loera-Brust, a UFW spokesman, said deporting millions would be nearly impossible logistically. The point of Trump’s rhetoric, he said, was to instill fear in farmworkers so they don’t demand their rights.

Farmers who support Trump are “voting basically to try to deny their workforce labor rights and to try to reduce their workforce’s wages,” De Loera-Brust said. “I don’t think you need to psychoanalyze it that much further beyond, ‘This is in their economic interest.’”

Investigate Midwest requested interviews with several industry groups to discuss the candidates’ stances on immigration and the potential impact on agriculture. The Meat Institute, which represents the meatpacking industry, said the immigration policy it supported was expanding the visa labor program to include its industry.

“Continued labor problems in the processing sector will hamper production and drive up costs, hurting both upstream producers and downstream consumers,” Sarah Little, the group’s spokesperson, said in an email. “Efforts to address the labor needs of agriculture must consider both the production sector and the processing sector.”

However, most either didn’t respond or declined to comment. For example, the American Farm Bureau Federation, which positions itself as the voice of agriculture, said it does “not endorse candidates nor engage in election politics.” 

However, through political action committees, the bureau’s state affiliates endorse candidates. The federation’s current administrative head, Joby Young, was a high-ranking official in Trump’s U.S. Department of Agriculture. 

Farm labor is dangerous. In fields, workers risk pesticide exposure, which can cause skin rashes. Long-term exposure can cause cancer or contribute to developmental issues in offspring. Tractors have crushed limbs. Workers have died falling into grain bins.

The pay is also unappealing. Agriculture is exempt from federal overtime laws. Sometimes, workers are paid “piece rate,” meaning their earnings depend on how much they harvest in a day.

In meatpacking plants, workers perform the same motion, over and over, with sharp knives. Workers have suffered tendinitis, lacerations and amputations. Because it’s so difficult, plants sometimes gradually increase newbies’ hours: It’s called “break-in pain.” And, as the COVID-19 pandemic struck, plant workers were forced to return to their jobs, exposing themselves and their families to the virus.

Many U.S. citizens do not want jobs like this, Dudley said. Sometimes, farmers feel they have no choice but to overlook suspect IDs.

“These are valued employees,” an anonymous farmer told Minnesota Public Radio in 2019 after he suspected U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were surveilling his employees. “We get their IDs and everything. Do we know if they’re legal or illegal? Well, we’re going to say we’re open on that. We don’t know that they are, we don’t know that they aren’t. But they are employees and they are the most hard-working people that you can find.”

One of those workers, for decades, was Gloria Solis. In 1998, she left Mexico, where she struggled to afford food and rent, and began picking cherries in Washington state. When Trump was in office, she tried to stay home as much as possible, fearing an interaction with authorities that might lead to deportation. She mostly risked it for her job and for medical appointments for her two sons, who are U.S. citizens, she said in Spanish through an interpreter. Each time, she prayed.

Some of her employers seemed emboldened by Trump, and the employers made it clear that, if she and her coworkers didn’t work hard enough, they could be easily replaced. When Biden was elected, she said, there was a noticeable change. Workers with legal status and workers who were undocumented were treated much more fairly, Solis, now 47, said.

“We know that (Biden) is no longer in it, but there is his partner,” she said. “Hopefully nothing will change because it’s perfectly fine. We are afraid that Trump will be elected. If he gets elected, then we won’t know what to do.”

Trump raids included ag job sites; Biden secured worker protections

Throughout Trump’s administration, immigration authorities raided farms and food processing plants. When Biden was elected, he reversed Trump’s directives. Instead of targeting workers, Biden focused on exploitative employers.

Under Trump, some of the most prominent agriculture companies in the U.S. dealt with immigration raids. In 2018, Christensen Farms — which owns two of the largest pork processing plants in the U.S., Seaboard Foods in Oklahoma and Triumph Foods in Missouri — was caught up in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement action. In 2019, raids in Mississippi rounded up about 700 undocumented workers. Some worked for Koch Foods, which supplies much of the poultry at Wal-Mart.

While the raids barely made a dent in the agricultural workforce, they had an effect. Many farmworkers feared speaking up about workplace abuses, said Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli, a National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition advocacy coordinator who previously worked as a Florida farmworker advocate.

“They felt like they couldn’t raise their voices about concerns they had on safety or wage theft or any kind of labor violation,” he said. “They just felt like it made them a target and they could easily be replaced.”

Many farmworkers who have been in the U.S. for decades travel north from Texas and Florida each year to work in Midwestern fields. But, with Trump in office, some in Florida decided to forgo the annual pilgrimage to avoid running into ICE, Xiuhtecutli said. Some took housekeeping or landscaping jobs to make ends meet. 

“I don’t think it was necessarily a positive change for them because it wasn’t steady work,” he said. “It was still seasonal.”

Once in office, Biden announced crackdowns on employers in the food supply chain that used migrant child labor, following a New York Times expose. Children worked in factories that processed or produced products for Walmart, Whole Foods and General Mills, the cereal giant.

In 2023, Biden also announced that workers who were in the country without documentation could be granted deferred action — i.e., not immediate deportation — if they witnessed or were victims of labor violations. The change would help hold “predatory” employers accountable, the administration said.

UFW’s De Loera-Brust said the deferred action rule was a “game changer” for unions. A couple dozen members of his union, which represents workers with a variety of legal statuses, have been granted stays under the new rule, he said.

“We’re actually able to tell workers not just that you will get better wages, better protections, better conditions through unionization,” he said. “We can actually also help protect you from deportation.”

Solis, the worker in Washington state, benefited from the new rule. In 2023, she was fired from her job on a mushroom farm. According to the state attorney general, the farm discriminated against female workers, including firing them, and was fined $3.4 million. Because of the incident, Solis was officially allowed to remain in the U.S. When she received the paperwork in the mail, she cried out of happiness all night, she said.

Another Biden rule, implemented this year, allowed H-2A farmworkers to invite union representatives into their employer-owned housing. It also banned employers from retaliating against workers trying to unionize. The state of New York allowed H-2A workers to unionize starting in 2020, which facilitated the unionization effort at Porpiglia Farms. The Biden rule codified the right for H-2A workers nationwide.

In late August, though, a judge temporarily blocked the rule after 17 Republican-led states sued the Biden administration over it. The administration asked the judge to narrow the breadth of the injunction, which would allow some other farmworker protections to be enacted, according to Bloomberg Law. The request was denied.

Beyranevand, at the agriculture and food systems center, said the rule would be an important step for farmworkers. But the challenge would be enforcing it, and having workers believe they won’t face retaliation.

“I don’t know that a lot of farmworkers are going to invite in labor representatives or anyone that is putting their job in jeopardy if the farm owner is able to catch a whiff of that,” she said.

Trump and his allies promise hard-line immigration policies

Deporting millions of farmworkers could have far-reaching consequences, experts and advocates said.

If the agricultural workforce were suddenly gone, the U.S. would likely have to rely much more heavily on imported food, said Dudley, of the Cornell farmworker program. That could lead to higher food prices, especially if another Trump proposal — replacing the income tax with tariffs on imports — is enacted. In turn, that could put more price pressure on individual consumers, particularly ones in food-insecure families, Dudley said. (Some research suggests that more immigrants and H-2A workers in the food system leads to less inflation at the supermarket.)

Relying on imported food could become a national security issue. It could be easier for a foreign adversary to destabilize the U.S. if its food supply was prevented from reaching its shores. (The Biden administration said in a 2022 memo it was looking into how to bolster the security of the food system.)

Another consequence of mass deportation would be the gutting of the social safety net, Dudley said. In 2022, undocumented immigrants paid almost $100 billion in taxes, and about a third went to Medicare and Social Security, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. 

“If you transition away from an undocumented labor force in agriculture, construction, restaurants, and other service sectors,” Dudley said, “there would be a significant financial loss to those systems, affecting all beneficiaries including the growing number of ‘baby boomers’ who are increasingly reliant on those programs for their financial well-being.”

The dairy industry relies heavily on undocumented labor, and it can’t use the H-2A program because milking cows is not a seasonal job. When asked to discuss the potential impact of a Trump presidency, the National Milk Producers Federation, which represents the dairy industry, said it had no one on staff “whose expertise aligns with the story you’re writing.” The Dairy Business Association, which represents Wisconsin dairies, said it is not commenting on the election.

Instead of undocumented labor, Trump signaled his support for the H-2A program, an increasingly popular program bereft with labor abuses. In a 2018 press release, Trump’s U.S. Department of Agriculture called the program a “source of legal and verified labor for agriculture.”

While in office, Trump made it easier for employers to hire H-2A workers, including eliminating some red tape. He also sought to change how visa workers were paid, which would have limited their earnings.

But close allies of Trump have proposed eliminating the program altogether. They’ve also recommended ending its sister program, the H-2B visa, which the meatpacking industry has latched onto. Both visa programs are intended to address seasonal labor shortages.

The Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative think tank, is behind the proposals, known as Project 2025. Trump has distanced himself from it, but The Washington Post reported he flew on a private jet with its leader in 2022, and CNN found at least 140 people who worked in Trump’s administration are involved in the project.

Actually eliminating the visa programs would likely be incredibly unpopular among farmers and industry lobbying groups, especially without a viable alternative, Beyranevand said.

The visa system “provides a really stable workforce for the agricultural sector,” she said. “Without the stability, I would imagine that farm businesses would be really opposed to something like that.”

The number of meatpacking plants that use H-2B visa workers has increased six-fold since 2015, according to federal labor department data. Little said her organization, the Meat Institute, would continue to ensure the H-2B visa was open to the meatpacking industry. Also, the industry supported reforming the H-2A program to “include meat and poultry processing and to recognize the year-round labor needs of the industry,” she said.

Tom Bressner, the executive director of the Wisconsin Agri-Business Association, said his organization wants to see the use of the H-2A program expanded, as well. It also supports streamlining the application process and removing some red tape.

“It’s a good program, but it really needs some major tweaking to make it work more effectively,” he said. “You talk about a nightmare to try to qualify for that program. You’ve got people out there wanting to work and we need them.”

The National Corn Growers Association, which represents an industry that hires H-2A labor regularly, said it did not comment on presidential elections. 

De Loera-Brust, with UFW, said he thinks Trump’s campaign rhetoric is not intended to translate into actual, on-the-ground policy. He made similar comments as a candidate in 2016 and as president, but deportations on the scale Trump promised did not occur.

“What I think the mass deportation slogan is really about is scaring workers,” De Loera-Brust said. “It’s about making immigrant workers feel like they cannot count on tomorrow, so they better keep their heads down and not say anything if they’re getting screwed out of their wages.”

Harris has voiced support for a path to citizenship 

In general, top Democrats have cracked down hard on illegal immigration while offering some relief. The Democratic president before Biden, Barack Obama, was often called the “deporter-in-chief” by his critics as he deported more undocumented immigrants than Trump. However, he also instituted the deferred action for childhood arrivals, or DACA, policy.

At the Democratic National Convention, Harris continued walking this line. In her speech accepting the Democratic Party nomination, she promised to sign bipartisan border security legislation into law.

“I know we can live up to our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants — and reform our broken immigration system,” she said. “We can create an earned pathway to citizenship — and secure our border.”

As president, Biden has cracked down on illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border. In early September, the New York Times reported he was considering making it tougher to enter the country without a visa by permanently blocking most asylum claims. This year, the numbers have dropped to their lowest point in years. (Because of the economic importance of immigration, some experts also worried about how Biden’s policies could impact the economy, Politico reported.)

Biden tasked Harris with addressing immigration. In 2021, she visited the Northern Triangle, the area of Central America where many recent immigrants originate. She spearheaded the Biden administration’s attempt to address poverty, violence and corruption in the area, the so-called “root causes” of immigration. When she visited Guatemala, Harris told those looking to journey to the U.S.: “Do not come.”

In his 2025 budget, Biden said he’d address immigration by hiring more than a thousand new border patrol agents and about 400 immigration judges to reduce the case backlog. In the Democratic Party platform, released for its convention, party leaders said it would “explore opportunities to identify or create work permits for immigrants, long-term undocumented residents, and legally processed asylum seekers in our country.”

Xiuhtecutli, with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, said the Biden administration probably eased concerns for undocumented immigrants who had lived in the U.S. for decades, mostly because the population was not a near-constant target of powerful politicians.

“There was some relief, at least in the sense that it wasn’t being talked about as openly,” he said, “but, in the community, there’s still the perception that the border was still going to be a hot zone, that it was difficult to cross, still.”

Some farmworker advocates are hopeful for what a Harris administration could mean. When it endorsed Harris, UFW, the California-based farmworker union, said Harris was the “best leader to defeat Donald Trump and to continue the transformative work of the Biden-Harris administration.” Biden, it added, had been the “greatest friend” the union had.

Solis, who is a UFW member, said she hopes Harris continues the policies Biden implemented and possibly goes further. Trump’s rhetoric stigmatized her and her family, she said, particularly when he said he’d end the birthright citizenship of her sons. 

“I would tell him — with all due respect because he was president — he does not know how much he has hurt them with the way he expresses himself,” she said.

Mónica Cordero and Jennifer Bamberg contributed to this story.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Deportations, raids and visa access: How the presidential election could alter life for immigrant farmworkers is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

For the third year in a row, extreme drought conditions in the Midwest are drawing down water levels on the Mississippi River, raising prices for companies that transport goods downstream and forcing governments and business owners to seek alternative solutions.

Extreme swings between drought and flooding have become more frequent in the region, scientists say, as climate change alters the planet’s weather patterns and inches the average global temperature continually upward.

“Without question, it’s discouraging that we’re in year three of this. Because that is quite unique to have multiple years in a row of this,” said Mike Steenhoek, executive director of the Soy Transportation Coalition, a trade organization representing Midwest soy growers. “We’re obviously trending in the wrong direction.”

Since 2022, much of the Midwest has experienced some level of drought, with the driest conditions concentrated in Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska and Kansas. Record rainfall in June and during part of July temporarily broke that dry spell, forecasters say, only for drought conditions to reemerge in recent weeks along the Ohio River basin, which typically supplies more water to the Mississippi than any other major tributary.

Water levels have been dropping in the lower Mississippi since mid-July, federal data show, reaching nearly seven feet below the historic average in Memphis on Sept. 13. In October 2023, water levels reached a record-low -11 feet in Memphis. Remnants of Hurricane Francine, which made landfall in Louisiana Wednesday night as a Category 2 storm, “will provide only temporary relief,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a news release Wednesday.

“Rainfall over the Ohio Valley is also not looking to be widespread and heavy enough to generate lasting effects and anticipate that much of the rainfall will soak into the ground with little runoff,” the agency said in the release.

Those conditions have raised prices for companies transporting fuel and grain down the Mississippi in recent weeks as load restrictions force barge operators to limit their hauls, which squeezes their profit margin. Barge rates from St. Louis reached $24.62 a ton in late August and $27.49 per ton by the following week, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Steenhoek said barge prices during the first week of September were 8 percent higher than the same week last year and 57 percent higher than the three-year average. “It does change that supply demand relationship,” he said, “because now all of a sudden you’re having to transport a given amount of freight with less capacity.”

A river in flux

Aaron Wilson, Ohio’s state climatologist and a professor at Ohio State University, said the whiplash between this summer’s record wet months and September’s drought conditions appears to fit what could be an emerging climate trend observed by researchers.

The Midwest region has generally gotten wetter over the decades. The Fifth National Climate Assessment, released last year, reported that annual precipitation increased by 5 to 15 percent across much of the Midwest in the 30-year period leading up to 2021, compared to the average between 1901 and 1960.

But evidence also suggests the Midwest is experiencing more frequent swings between extreme wet and extreme dry seasons, with climate models predicting that the trend will persist into the future, said Wilson, who was the lead author of the assessment’s Midwest chapter.

“This was front and center for us,” he said. “One of the main things that we talked about were these rapid oscillations … between wet to dry and dry to wet extremes.”

Research also suggests that seasonal precipitation is trending in opposite directions and will continue to do so in the coming decades, Wilson added. “And so what you get is too much water in the winter and spring and not enough during the growing season,” he said, referring to summer months.

If that evidence holds true, it could have notable impacts on U.S. food exports moving forward.

Future impacts on shipping 

Transporting goods, including corn, soy and fuel, on the Mississippi is more efficient pound for pound than ground transportation, business groups say, and gives the U.S. an edge in a competitive global market. According to the Waterways Council, a trade association for businesses that use the Mississippi River, a standard 15-barge load is equivalent to 1,050 semi trucks or 216 train cars — meaning domestic farmers and other producers can save significant time and money moving their goods by boat.

The majority of U.S. agricultural exports rely on the Mississippi to reach the international market as farmers move their crops to export hubs on the Gulf Coast, said Debra Calhoun, senior vice president of the Waterways Council. “More than 65 percent of our national agriculture products that are bound for export are moving on this inland waterway system,” she said. “So this system is critical to farmers of any size farm.”

The ramifications could be especially harmful to the soy industry, Steenhoek said, since about half of the soy grown in the U.S. is exported. By the last week of August, grain exports transported by barge fell 17 percent compared to the week before, according to a Thursday report released by the USDA.

Steenhoek said the increased costs to U.S. growers hurt their ability to compete globally. Any price increase to domestic grain could encourage international clients to instead buy from rival countries like Brazil or Argentina, he said.

While it’s typical for water levels on the Mississippi to drop during the fall months, Steenhoek said, the recent years of drought have been a real wakeup call for farmers to diversify their supply chains. Soy growers, he said, have since set up new supply chain agreements with rail lines and have even invested in new export terminals in Washington state and on the coast of Lake Michigan in Milwaukee.

Luckily, Calhoun said, disruptions to river transportation this year haven’t been nearly as bad as they were last year, when the Mississippi’s water levels reached record lows. Several barges were grounded last year and in 2022, she said, referring to when boats get stuck on the riverbed or in areas where sediment has built up. That hasn’t occurred so far this year. 

She chalks that up to proactive efforts this year by companies and federal agencies, like the Army Corps of Engineers, to mitigate transportation disruptions. 

George Stringham, chief of public affairs for the corps’ St. Louis District, said the corps started dredging the river a few weeks earlier this year. “We started early to get ahead of things, in anticipation, after having two straight years of low water conditions,” said Stringham. Dredging involves moving sediment on the riverbed from areas where it can cause problems to boats to areas where it won’t. 

Wilson, Ohio’s climatologist, said he has seen stronger cooperation among stakeholders in tackling this issue. “It’s a mix of climate scientists, social scientists and planners and emergency preparedness folks that are really coordinating this effort,” he said.

The result, Calhoun said, is that their coalition of groups have been able to handle the disruptions relatively well this year, which leaves her feeling cautiously optimistic. “It’s really hard, you know, to track this and try to figure out: Is it just normal? Is it getting much worse? Are we going to have to make significant changes, and if so, what would they be? But we’re not there yet,” she said.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Another Midwest drought is causing transportation headaches on the Mississippi River is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

After notifying a northwest Wisconsin town last October of their intent to challenge a local ordinance that regulates livestock farming, two residents last week made good on their promise.

Ben and Jenny Binversie, represented by the legal arm of the state’s largest business and manufacturing lobby, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, are asking a circuit court judge to strike down the rules in the Polk County town of Eureka.

A ruling in their favor could set a precedent for all Wisconsin municipalities seeking to regulate agriculture, a $105 billion state industry.

“This ordinance is quite simply another case of government overreach,” the Binversies’ attorney Scott Rosenow, executive director of WMC Litigation Center, said in a press release.

He did not respond to a request for an interview. Jenny Binversie directed inquiries to Ben Binversie, who declined to comment.

Eureka’s ordinance, revised in March 2022, regulates large livestock farms, known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. It doesn’t regulate where large livestock farms can go, but how they operate.

The regulations apply to new CAFOs, or smaller facilities with common ownership, that house at least 700 “animal units” — the equivalent of 1,750 swine or 500 dairy cows.

The rules require applicants to apply for an operations permit and submit plans for preventing infectious diseases, air pollution and odor; managing waste and handling dead animals. They also mandate traffic and property value impact studies, a pot of money set aside for cleanups and decommissioning, and an annual permit fee — atop costs to review the application and enforce the permit terms.

The Binversies’ attorneys find fault with 18 of the ordinance’s requirements, particularly fees. They also claim that Wisconsin preempts local authorities from passing regulations that are more stringent than the state’s unless authorities can prove they are necessary to protect public health or safety.

Even under that exception, which the attorneys say Eureka doesn’t demonstrate, they contend that more restrictive ordinances cannot add new requirements for which no state standards exist. They also argue Eureka’s ordinance imposes new performance standards that the state must approve, which they say the town hasn’t done.

The lawsuit acknowledges the ordinance’s requirements don’t apply to the Binversies, but the attorneys claim they harm the couple and other Eureka taxpayers because the town will use public funds to compensate local authorities and consultants to review permit applications and enforce the ordinance.

In addition to Eureka, four other northwest Wisconsin towns passed operations ordinances after a developer proposed in 2019 constructing a farrowing operation, known as Cumberland LLC, that would have housed up to 26,350 pigs — the largest swine CAFO in Wisconsin.

An advisory group drafted the regulations to plug gaps in state livestock laws, which they believe insufficiently protect health, property and quality of life. For instance, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources cannot regulate issues unrelated to water quality, including air, noise and vehicle traffic. 

Meanwhile, Wisconsin’s “right-to-farm” law protects farmers from nuisance claims, and livestock facility regulations restrict the use of zoning to control where CAFOs are sited.

No CAFOs currently operate in Eureka, a Polk County community of 1,700, but unlike other towns’ operations ordinances, Eureka’s requires CAFOs that intend to spread manure on fields within town boundaries to obtain a permit.

Another community with a CAFO ordinance, Laketown, also faced a lawsuit.

The two Laketown farm families who challenged its regulations included Michael and the late Joyce Byl and Sara Byl, who are the parents and sister, respectively, of Jenny Binversie. They were likewise represented by WMC Litigation Center. The town of Eureka sought to intervene, noting the two towns’ ordinances are “nearly identical.”

Laketown rescinded its regulations following a change in elected leadership, rendering the case moot.

Trial lawyer Andy Marshall, who represented the community and will do the same for Eureka, questioned whether a Polk County judge would agree that the Binversies have legal standing.

“It’s odd to me that they make the argument that somehow the plaintiffs have been damaged because their taxes will go to the optional hiring of experts,” he added. “It simply hasn’t happened yet.”

A judgment against Eureka might invalidate any Wisconsin municipality’s operations ordinance depending on the scope of a court ruling.

Town chair Don Anderson said he is concerned by the lawsuit, but believes the operations ordinance is important. The town of Trade Lake, where the swine farm was proposed and an operations ordinance also enacted, is not so distant from Eureka.

“We’re just wanting to protect ourselves in case it should happen,” he said.

Outside of the court challenges, state lawmakers recently attempted to preempt local farming regulations.

A bill that would have restricted local control passed both chambers earlier this year before Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers vetoed it.

The proposal concerned only animal welfare, the administration of medications and vaccinations, and the ways animals are used, but skeptics believed it would have established a legal precedent that could limit any safeguards against potential harms caused by large livestock farms.

A public hearing, where lawmakers discussed the northwest Wisconsin towns, gave them cause to worry.

Tim Fiocchi, Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation’s government relations director, expressed alarm that local ordinances, such as Laketown’s, “destabilize agricultural production” by creating a “patchwork of regulatory hurdles.”

Lisa Doerr, a Laketown forage farmer who chaired the town advisory group, said the Binversie case represents the latest effort at “harassing” those who “have the nerve to stand up” to the agricultural industry by enacting ordinances.

“They’ve been telling us for five years that this was illegal, but what did they do over the winter?” she said. “They went to the Legislature and tried to make it illegal because it’s not illegal.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Wisconsin town of Eureka sued over large farm regulations is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.