Many conservation practices we take for granted today were born in the 1930s in a part of western Wisconsin known as the Driftless Region, an area that was missed by the glaciers, resulting in striking geological features. Here the Coon Creek Watershed Project became the first of many conservation projects that would spread across the country under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s newly created Soil Erosion Service.
The Coon Creek pilot project, led by Hugh Hammond Bennett, who is known as “the father of soil conservation,” devised techniques to stop the Dust Bowl, a human-caused ecological disaster that devastated much of the country in the 1930s. In the Driftless Region, the enemy was not so much wind, but water, and the techniques developed here would be effective against both.
Michael J. Smith
Conservation practices including contour stripcropping, terracing, and crop rotation were born in Wisconsin in the 1930s in a part of western Wisconsin known as the Driftless Region.
Bennett pioneered conservation practices including contour stripcropping, terracing, and crop rotation that were incredibly successful, spreading to other watershed projects and eventually the whole country. Those practices were also instrumental in reversing the Dust Bowl and saving vital crops.
Today, the same watershed that led us out of that disaster more than eighty years ago is once again showing us signs that we are on the brink of another—mostly human-made—ecological disaster. And just as before, this literal watershed has the chance to become a watershed moment in pioneering new ways to handle the extreme environmental impacts of climate change and perhaps even reverse its damages.
In 2018, the Driftless Region was hit by a weather event so unusual that it drew the attention of agencies at the national level. Between August 26 and September 5 of that year, parts of southwestern Wisconsin received up to an unprecedented 23.42 inches of rain. This included twelve to fourteen inches of rain during a single twenty-four-hour period. The flooding impacted communities along Coon Creek, the Kickapoo River, and the Little La Crosse River and passed record flood levels, in some places by feet, that had been set just ten years earlier in 2008.
Five earthen dams built in the 1950s and 1960s for flood control either failed or “overtopped,” meaning that the main outlet pipe that allows a stream to flow through the dam was full, the auxiliary spillway designed to handle extreme events was full, and the water was now flowing over the main part of the dam from one hill to the other. This was the first time experts had ever seen this happen to any of the more than 11,000 such dams across the country. Five dams in one place all failing from one event. Unprecedented.
In response, the national office of the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), which oversees all the nation’s earthen dams, came to Wisconsin to investigate. The resulting study, whose $1.8 million cost is being borne by the NRCS, is focused on the Coon Creek and West Fork Kickapoo watersheds. If these dams, most being more than seventy years old, were not able to handle the increasingly violent weather events, something would have to shift. Either the infrastructure would have to be increased to handle the change or people would have to be moved out of the way. Both solutions were daunting, if not impossible.
That NRCS study is in its final stages, but so far has not delivered good news to area residents. Preliminary recommendations suggest that rebuilding the dams in these watersheds to meet the new climate conditions would be very expensive and not cost effective. As a result, the study has proposed decommissioning all but one of the dams in these two watersheds in the coming years. It will cost many millions of dollars just to remove them.
But the residents of this area didn’t need a national study to tell them what they already knew: These watersheds have changed. Even if the words “climate change” are still too hard for some people to say, you would be hard pressed to find anyone in this part of the country that won’t tell you they are just waiting for the next big climate catastrophe.
Local residents’ fear and nervousness are well placed. Between 2007 and 2018, the terms for 100-, 500-, and even 1,000-year floods have lost all meaning. New flood records were set in 2007, 2008, and 2018, with flood events almost as high about every two years in between. According to local conservationist Bob Micheel, the average rainfall near his home in Monroe County, Wisconsin, is thirty-two inches per year; in 2018, it received almost sixty inches.
The NRCS study is making it painfully clear that infrastructure solutions are likely out of reach. As USDA-NRCS State Conservation Engineer Steve Becker put it when presenting the study results, it seems less and less likely we can “engineer [our] way out of” this problem. If infrastructure is not a solution, that leaves the other option of “moving people out of the way.”
That process is already beginning with four communities along the Kickapoo River—Ontario, La Farge, Viola, and Readstown—landing federal grants to develop flood mitigation and relocation plans. Infrastructure is being flood-proofed, roads are being raised, and land is being developed for businesses and homes to move to.
But a third way to help combat these changes is also emerging from the Coon Creek model from the 1930s. Numerous projects are exploring creative solutions that might collectively alleviate the level of destruction from these all-too-frequent events. Besides the NRCS study, research by students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison looked at flood resiliency in the Coon Creek watershed and found that there has been a significant reduction of contour stripcropping and alfalfa planting on agricultural land because of the growth of large farms and the increased focus on soy and corn cash cropping. Fewer forage crops means less water retention on the landscape.
A National Science Foundation–funded project by the University of Wisconsin–Madison will study how stream restoration affects flood resiliency in the Kickapoo River and Coon Creek watersheds, and the Environmental Protection Agency will examine how conservation credit trading programs will impact water quality and flooding on the Kickapoo River.
But local residents and governments are not waiting for those large-scale studies to save them.
In the spirit of the first Coon Creek Watershed Project, Monroe County has also formed a Climate Change Task Force. The committee has the support of the county board and has started targeting easy low-hanging-fruit projects, like stream crossing inventories to prioritize trouble spots, property buyouts, and weather stations to increase reaction times during floods. The task force has partnered with Wisconsin’s Green Fire organization to conduct a Climate Readiness and Rural Economic Opportunity Assessment, which looks at a broad range of areas including infrastructure, agriculture, forestry, and climate and hydrological modeling.
And innovation is bubbling up from residents themselves. Several producer-led watershed groups are underway, with farmers and producers devising and implementing conservation practices where they live. These groups are popular because, while they get initial startup money from the State of Wisconsin, their projects are self-governed and self-implemented. There are thirty-six such groups across the state and four in this part of the Driftless, including the Tainter Creek Farmer-Led Watershed Council, the Coon Creek Community Watershed Council, the West Fork Watershed Neighbors Council, and the Bad Axe River Watershed Council. All of these projects are implementing the next generation of conservation practices like rotational grazing, regenerative agriculture, and buffer strips.
Each of these efforts, from the ground level all the way up to the federal studies, offers reasons to be hopeful that once again, a monumental shift in our landscape and environment is possible, and can help lessen climate devastation in the decades to come. Individually, none of these approaches is the answer, but the hope is that collectively they can restore the balance that allows people to live and work here.