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Wind energy gives American farmers a new crop to sell in tough times

Inflation-adjusted U.S. Net Farm Income

U.S farmers have faced difficult times over the past several years due to erratic weather, trade wars and low commodity price. Family farm bankruptcies reached an eight-year high in 2019. Net income for U.S farms ( in billions)”

In 2019 inflation -adjusted dollars; SOURCE Department of Argriculture, ERS, Farm Bureau calculations; GRAPHIC George Petras/USA TODAY

For some, lease payments to a wind farm to put up a turbine increasingly provide a cushion against the harsh economics of farm life.

Across Kansas, wind turbine lease payments are $15 million to $20 million a year, according to the American Wind Energy Association. Nationally, it’s $250 million.

The money matters. About 180 miles south of Meridian Way is the Elk River Wind Farm. Pete Ferrell, 67, of unincorporated Butler County, said wind helped save the ranch, just as oil helped save it back in his father’s day.

“Dad allowed oil production here. There was a big drought in the 1950s. He said, ‘In all honesty, it was the money from the oil that got us through”, he said.

To Ferrell, harvesting the almost constantly blowing Kansas wind is another way to make a living out of the land. Elk River’s 100 turbines sport enormous blades, each 125 feet long, that sit atop 260-foot towers. From any distance away, they appear silent as the raw winter wind whips by. From directly underneath, their susurrations combine the sounds of flags snapping in a strong breeze and the whir of a rumbling ice cream maker. The nearby air fills with the electric motor thrum of the oil pump jacks they are interspersed with.

A turbine on Meridian Way Wind Farm, operated EDP Renewables, is capable of producing 3 megawatts of electricity Meridian Way has 67 of them. Jasper Colt, USA TODAY

For Ferrell, leasing land for wind turbines is reminiscent of the side jobs and town jobs many farmers and ranchers have always needed to get by.

“I really wasn’t going to survive as a rancher without outside income, or I was going to work myself to death doing 15-hour days,” he said.

It’s that way across the Midwest, said Kerri Johannsen, energy program director with the Iowa Environmental Council. “It’s not so much about green energy at all, but economics.”

Iowa is a state that produces things from the land. She said wind is “just another crop, another opportunity to capture resources.”

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