“Absentee landowners may be gaining financially from [wind power] 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 recent letter 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.…