Wind: The Farmer's New Cash Crop (E Magazine, via AlterNet)

Wind: The Farmer's New Cash Crop

By Joseph D'Agnese, E Magazine. Posted June 23, 2007.



How a small farm town traded its dairy cows for renewable energy.

In the spring of 1999 a stranger named Bill Moore arrived in the small town of Lowville, the county seat of Lewis County, New York, and checked into the Ridge View Motor Lodge on Route 12. Like many towns in this county, Lowville (the "Low" rhymes with "now") is blanketed with countless parcels of farmland and pastureland that are whipped, especially in winter, by powerful winds gusting out of Canada, 60 miles to the north.

This is dairy country, though the constant pressure for cheap milk has made the economics too chancy for single-family dairies. Moore, a broad-shouldered Yale man who had worked on Wall Street, had a passion for renewable energy and owned a company, Atlantic Renewable, that had already developed two wind farms -- one with seven turbines and the other with 20 -- 75 miles south of town. He had what he considered a good proposal for the 27,000 citizens of Lewis County: Milk wind, not cows.

When he started telling the locals about his notion, Moore was met with indulgent smiles but little genuine enthusiasm. "I made a presentation at a town meeting, and they looked at me like I was from Mars," he says. "They were polite. They didn't openly laugh."

Next, he wandered the countryside, knocking on farmhouse doors to ask permission to erect meteorological equipment to test the wind speed. "I was thrown out by a number of people," he says. "They've listened to a lot of sales pitches over the years: seed salesmen, fertilizer salesmen." As he'd learned over the years, farmers were a tough crowd to win over.

Eight years later, though, it's as if the cool reception Moore received never happened at all. Windmills stud the flat, stark landscape as far as the eye can see. Each turbine is taller than the Statue of Liberty, and nearly all of them are spinning inexorably toward the future of Lewis County -- and perhaps our own.

This is the Maple Ridge Wind Farm, the nation's largest new alternative energy project east of the Mississippi River. In the last year or so, 195 turbines have become operational in the towns of Lowville, Harrisburg, and Martinsburg, capable of producing 320 megawatts of electricity, the amount generated by a medium-size power plant, or enough power to run 98,000 homes. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/environment/54682/