General News

Harvesting The Wind

Harvesting The Wind

by Kindra Gordon

Looking for another crop to harvest? Consider the wind. Wind turbines are compatible with raising crops, forages and livestock, says Lisa Daniels, director of Windustry, a Minnesota-based organization devoted to educating landowners about wind energy. They take less than 2% of the land out of production, and it's an additional source of revenue. With wind energy potential pegged at 10,777 billion

Read article, Hay and Forage Grower, March 1, 2004

Catch the Wind

Minnesota's wind-power industry is picking up speed.

By Mary Hoff
Photography by Michael Petersen

The sight could well make you feel as though you've awakened in a surrealistic world - one in which past, present, and future have been cut up and pasted together into a single scene, like those collages schoolchildren make for book reports and social studies projects. At your feet, fat-leaved soybeans stand in tidy, timeless rows. Above, the achingly blue sky, interrupted here and there by scudding clouds, stretches from horizon to horizon. Connecting the two are hundreds - count 'em, hundreds - of skyscraping white towers, each standing 10 times as tall as the faded farmhouse on the side of the road, each holding aloft a gigantic propellerlike device turning cartwheels in the wind.

Read the article:

Mary Hoff, Minnesota Conservation Volunteer, November-December 2003.

Pages

Subscribe to General News