The Incompatibility of Wind and Crop ‘Farming’

by Lisa Linowes
July 1, 2013

“Absentee landowners may be gaining financially from [wind power] the development, but the idea that “wind farming” is a compatible agriculture use is more myth than reality in Illinois…. In fact, those Illinois farmers who have leveraged their operations conservatively tell us that they’re not interested in the ‘windfall’ of wind farming.”

The wind industry continues to claim that wind “farming” and agriculture are compatible land uses. Here it is again in a recentletter in the Wall Street Journal by the American Wind Energy Association defending the economics of wind power.

For years, politicians and urban/suburbanites have been treated to heaping doses of win-win business tales of family farmers leasing sections of their crop land for wind development, while working the soil right up to the towers and earning extra revenue to keep the land open. But like so Big Wind hype, there’s an ugly reality that has gone untold.

Turbine Roads, Soil Compaction, and Reduced Crop Yields

Back in 2007, Windaction.org posted “What have I done?” a true story about a farmer in Northeast Fond du Lac County (Wisconsin) who agreed to lease a portion of his land for wind development. He said:

I watched stakes being driven in the fields and men using GPS monitors to place markers here and there. When the cats and graders started tearing 22 foot wide roads into my fields, the physical changes started to impact not only me and my family, but unfortunately, my dear friends and neighbors….

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