2024-01-22 08:30:00
This article by Yale Climate Connections is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
The tall grass prairie of the Flint Hills provides food for cattle, and on the Ferrell Ranch, wind to power 50 turbines. The 7,000-acre ranch in Beaumont, Kansas was started by Pete Ferrell’s great-grandfather in 1888. But ranching is hard work, and success is dependent on the weather, so in the 1920s, Ferrell’s grandfather sold leases to extract and sell oil from the land. Those wells helped the ranch survive years when drought dried up income from the ranching operations.
But now Pete Ferrell is extracting another form of energy: wind. Since 2005, wind turbines have been producing renewable power for the grid and a reliable cash crop for the ranch.
Yale Climate Connections spoke with Ferrell about his ranch and his journey with wind energy.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Yale Climate Connections: Can you describe the tall grass prairie that your ranch is on?
Pete Ferrell: It looks like an ocean of grass, if you can imagine looking across an ocean with massive swells. Our rainfall here is almost 40 inches, and so we get this incredible amount of beautiful grass, and it’s something to behold if you haven’t seen it. You can see to the horizon, and the ranch here is on the highest place in the Flint Hills. So, by pure dumb luck, my great-grandfather chose the perfect site for a wind farm.
YCC: Can you tell me a little bit about the history of wind energy on the ranch?
Ferrell: In 1994–95, a company approached me and proposed building a wind farm on this ranch. And quite frankly, because it was so foreign to me, my first response was, “No, we’re not doing that.” I didn’t have a positive response to begin with.
But they knew it was way out of the box [for me]and they were patient. They flew me to California, east of San Francisco, near the Altamont Pass. At that time, it was the only other place in the United States where wind turbines coexisted with ranching. And it was there that I met with other ranchers. And I remember one of them said to me, “We have been able to go on with our ranching operation, and we find no problem with the wind turbines being compatible with our ranching operation.” So that was a turning point for me to actually talk with another rancher who had done it, and I came home and did more research. And I began to really understand that we have a carbon problem, a big carbon problem. In the mid-90s, that was becoming obvious.
YCC: How did the community react to the idea of putting wind turbines on your property?
Ferrell: The range of responses is from one end to the other, and I can’t ever predict if it will be well received or not. I had no idea that it would be so controversial when we did this. I was a bit caught off-guard by the negative responses because, by the time I agreed to allow the park to be constructed, I was convinced that it was a net benefit not only for this ranch but for rural communities and for the nation at large in our attempt to lower CO2 emissions.
I strongly believe we have to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, and I felt that this was an excellent statement on how we might do that. But the community at large, some of them didn’t see it that way. There were many efforts to stop construction, to halt construction by legal actions. The developer prevailed through all of those, and we eventually built the park. But to this day, I’m aware that it’s very divisive, not only in this rural community but in many rural communities.
YCC: And how many turbines are on your land now, and what does that look like?
Ferrell: The park was completed in 2005. The total park is 150 megawatts and there are 100 turbines, and 50 of them are on the Ferrell Ranch. The other 50 are on three adjoining ranches that are off to the west of us. But it looks like just very large plants out on the prairie, and so that’s how I choose to look at them, and I see them as something highly beneficial.
YCC: You mentioned when you were first approached you were skeptical, and hearing the firsthand accounts of other ranchers who were doing this successfully was really what swayed you. Have you played that role for others?
Ferrell: My phone rang off the hook in the year or so following 2005 by other ranchers very interested in what I did and wanting to know how I did it. But I think many of them backed away in the face of the community resistance that they encountered. But I would say that nine out of 10 calls that I received were from farmers and ranchers wanting to know, “How can I get this done on my place?” And of course, at that point in time, wind farming as a sector of our economy was really quite young — this was kind of a moonshot. And we prevailed.
1705914181
#Wind #power #helps #Kansas #cattle #ranch #survive