Tonight on ABC World News with Charlie Gibson there will be a feature on the Wind COnnect wind turbines being built in my home town (Benton County, Indiana).
It is a fantastic project and also injecting alot of dollars into the struggling farm community. As I understand it, once complete, there will be 900-1000 wind turbines in the county. My family is currently in negotiations with one of the companies to construct 5-7 turbines in phase 1 and 5-8 in phase 2 on our farm land. They lease 1 acre per turbine and it is based on a 30 year lease (life expectancy of the turbine). Once the turbine is built and functioning, the farmers can plant and harvest 80% of leased arce. If they ever need to come in and service the turbine and distroy any crop, the farmer is paid market value for lost crop. The leases start at $7000-7500 per unit/acre and is pro-rated over the 30 years up to $9500-10000 per unit/arce. The added benefit right now if the fact that the wind mill companies are picking up the tab for all the county road/bridge contruction projects that needs to be done as they need good roads to get all the big equipment to each job site. They claim that each turbine generates enough power to run 7000 homes each year. I could type all day about this project, but I'll just leave it at that.
Check it out this evening, it's not often (if ever) that Benton County is featured in a national news story. If anyone is interested in seeing more pictures of some of the construction I took this spring, drop me an email and I'll send it your way

See.....there is more than corn in Indiana.

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