Some Wisconsin residents and researchers believe that the proliferation of high capacity wells for irrigation are behind the drop in lake levels in the region. Ryan Schuessler

The majority of the high capacity wells in the Central Sands are used for irrigation and farming. Corn and potato growers use the wells to pump water onto their fields.

“We think there are impacts, certainly, from high capacity well pumping,” said Tamas Houlihan, the executive director of the Wisconsin Potato and Vegetable Growers Association. “But we do not think they are causing adverse environmental impacts.”

A permit from the DNR is required to install a high capacity well, and critics point to the agency’s application process until last year as the problem.

In the past, the department considered each high capacity well permit application individually, without taking into account the cumulative effects of all wells in the area.

In September 2014, an administrative judge ruled against the DNR, ordering the agency to consider the cumulative effect of high capacity wells when considering new permits.

According to DNR data, in 2010 the department approved 435 wells. That number rose to 690 in 2014. So far this year, it has approved 244 wells — a 65 percent drop from the previous year, likely related to that ruling.

“The DNR, in its infinite wisdom, has said they could only look at one well at a time,” said Bob Clarke of the Friends of the Central Sands, a nonprofit environmental group. “It defies common sense, frankly.”

His organization was among those that challenged a 2011 high capacity well permit application filed by a proposed dairy farm that initially planned to install two such wells and pump upward of 100 million gallons of water annually.

“You’ve got to haul them to court and sue them to get them to do their job,” Kraft said of the DNR, for which he worked in the 1980s. “They’ve developed this shell where they won’t talk to you, they won’t engage with you.”

In another part of the state, some believe mining is threatening waterways. The number of frac sand mines and processing plants — which extract and process sand to be used in fracking fields in other parts of the country — has grown from about five to more than 120 since 2010, mostly in the western part of Wisconsin.

Many of the areas that are mined are hills and ridges, which are deforested and dug up. The seeps on the hills and ridges, though not necessarily sources of water, collect and flow into trout streams and wetlands.

“If you start taking away a significant amount of these ridges, you don’t have these feeders anymore,” said Lee Stahl, an area resident and a retired forest engineer. Stahl and others are worried that excess mining will permanently change the amount of water in area streams or the direction of their flows.

In the Central Sands, representatives of the agriculture industry maintain that the high capacity wells are neither the sole nor a major contributor to the dropping lake levels, and Houlihan said growers have not found satisfactory evidence to prove otherwise. If that information existed, he said, the industry would take measures to reduce its impact.

Without irrigation, crop yields would be down significantly.

“Something is causing those lakes and streams to go down, and it has everything to do with rainfall and precipitation,” he said. “And we feel there is an abundant recharge provided every year through rain and snowfall in Wisconsin.”

Residents like Trudell don’t buy it. In 2008 the small well he used to pump drinking water went dry, and he blames the high capacity wells. He and Lake Huron’s other residents have had to install new, deeper wells to keep water flowing from their taps.

“The waters belong to everybody,” he said. “[Agriculture] does not have some superseded right to pump all the water they want, to the detriment of others.”