North Dakota's ceaseless wind, long the farmer's foe, has become a crop of its own, and the great white turbines now share the horizon with the grain elevators.
The wind that scours the northern plains has tormented farmers since the first sod was broken, drifting the snow and blowing the topsoil and never seeming to rest. In recent years it has become an asset. North Dakota ranks among the windiest states in the country, and the turbines that have risen across its ridges harvest that wind into electricity by the megawatt.
Harvesting the Air
For the landowner, a turbine is a steady lease check that arrives whether the wheat makes or fails, a hedge against the weather written into the very land. The towers coexist easily with farming; the crop grows and the cattle graze right up to the base of each machine, and only a small pad is lost to the tower and its road.
From the almanac's reckoning:
- North Dakota ranks among the highest-wind states in the country.
- Turbine leases give landowners income independent of the crop year.
- Farming and grazing continue right up to the base of each tower.
The wind's fickleness remains its limit — it blows when it blows, not when the demand peaks — and so the grid must balance it against steadier sources. Still, the almanac counts the wind among the most promising of the plains' modern harvests, a crop that never needs planting.
Elsewhere in the Almanac
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