As a rancher in Osborne County that is not leasing to the proposed wind farm here, I took interest in your article of Dec. 31, 2007, “First Phase of State’s Fourth Wind Farm Nearing Completion.”
I have spent most of my life working to acquire and maintain my ranch properties and one parcel goes back four generations. Am I to sit and let this huge, disruptive, totally scenery changing wind farm operation take place around me, as helpless as the bison that originally roamed the prairie home?
I find business contracts offered me the poorest business venture I could ever make. One-third of 1 percent per structure value per year’s rent offered or, to my understanding, under 1 percent royalty hardly matches oil royalty.
What I see driving past the Lincoln project is a far bigger mess than any oil patch I’ve ever seen. We are asked to sign contracts for longer than the lands have been homesteaded. None of this is good business in my mind.
I see the Lincoln project as a monument to poverty shared in the community and the folks in Lincoln are supposed to receive over double the compensation that is being offered to the Osborne County landowner.
Osborne County must look like easy pickings for these wind farm opportunists with their government backing.
I’ll be brief in the way I feel about the disruption to nature and the changes in the scenery, the serenity lost and the privacy gone that I so enjoy as an Osborne County rancher. I do have very strong feelings for the natural prairie.
Surely, Governor Kathleen Sebelius and President Bush will be remembered in history with great disrespect for the scourge they have placed on our prairie lands! I find it rather odd they are willing to greatly disfigure the landscape for a convenience that has been with us such a short time and can be downright dangerous.
I do not want to be part of a low rent wind farm and hope there are others enough so we have a Kansas prairie fully up to our counties true life blood support of agriculture.
With faith in our prairie lands of Osborne County, I, for one, do not feel it appropriate to put up these tombstones to a failed agriculture.
–Kyle A. Brant, Lucas, Kan.
11 January 2008
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2008/01/11/wind-farms-are-not-good-for-this-rancher/