Rural Wisconsinites greatly value their water but believe that farm pollution and other practices may threaten it, according to a new University of Wisconsin-Madison survey examining perceptions about water issues from residents of the state’s less populated areas.
The survey results provide a record of these residents’ concerns as stubborn water quality issues like nitrate contamination continue to plague rural areas, and new ones like PFAS arise.
“If we’re thinking about how we want to manage or protect groundwater resources in the future, we really need to be thinking about what’s happening on the land surface. And if you look at Wisconsin, greater than 90% of the land is, really, rural land,” said Michael Cardiff, a professor in the department of geoscience at UW-Madison. “Rural water users are probably most connected to the largest area of land in Wisconsin, and could probably tell us about what sort of concerns they’re seeing.”
The survey was sent to 1,500 randomly selected households that the U.S. Census designates as rural in 16 Wisconsin counties, including Vilas, Buffalo, Kewaunee and Rock counties, between April and June 2023. Close to 500 respondents replied.