Pete Ferrell
speaker
120 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Pete Ferrell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, think about the investments that we make in farming and ranching and our equipment. We want to know. the longevity of that when we get the payout and we, we do the math on that. And so this was an example of that, of that investment. So,
Well, Yeah, you've got a lot in there. Let's unpack that. First of all, Sandy, who developed the company, literally sold it to a developer who could build it because he didn't have the multimillion-dollar balance sheet. So he sells it, and he told me he was going to do this, by the way. He said, look, I'm a primary development here. He revealed his financial status to me.
He says, I will sell this to somebody who has – literally a billion dollar balance sheet who can build it. And sure enough, one company built it and within a year it was sold to another company. That's why if I have one thing to say with your listeners is that, boy, you really need to do your homework on the agreement. And if I were doing it,
I wouldn't do what I did, which is I would sign with somebody who had a well-known reputation so that probably they will hang on to it. I would probably sign with a pretty big company, and boy, I would do exactly what I did. Go talk to a landowner who is doing business with them because they'll tell you the truth. They'll tell you what's really going on.
Well – From me or from them?
No offense to your listeners, but I'm not a very mechanically minded person. I mean, if it doesn't bleed, I don't get along with it. And so that's just my take on the world. And because of those deep roots I described earlier, it seemed, it was just really uncomfortable. Well, okay, let me back up even further.
Our family has a very unsatisfactory history with extraction of oil, which is almost completely gone on this ranch. And quite frankly, there had been an extraordinary amount of abuse from the oil companies once they leased, you know, the spillage, the damage, the rutting. So I had a bad taste in my mouth from that experience. And my family benefited.
Dad told me, he said he wasn't sure they would have gotten through the drought of the 50s had they not had the oil income. So I, okay, you... You made your point that this other form of income is helpful because, my God, we all face drought and bad markets and whatever. we're gambling every day in agriculture, in my opinion, no need to go to Vegas.
So anyway, I knew the benefits, but I also had this really bad taste in my mouth. And so I guess going to California and seeing how clean and well kept it was, was another thing that helped me move toward yes, because I was thinking, I was thinking, oh, we're just going to have more trash, more surface damage to the ranch, which was not true, which was absolutely.
In fact, I would say that wind farmers in general, they actually have to perform to a higher standard than other forms of energy extraction. And they do. I mean, I would give them this company that now owns this wind farm, I'd give them a gold star on their willingness to keep things clean, keep the gates shut. They tell us when we've got animals on the road.
We tell them when we see a problem with a turban. So it's been a good neighbor relationship for us. Again, that's where you've just got to know that that's going to happen before you'll say yes, I would think, you know.
Oh yeah.
Yes. Um, Let's fast forward. After this wind farm was built in 2005, my phone rang off the hook, Tanner. People heard the story of this Yahoo cowboy that somehow got a wind farm built on his ranch. They want to know how I did it. And so I became a consultant, especially for farmers and ranchers who were being approached. And I would tell them my story.
I told them what to watch out for, what I had learned at that point in time. And then eventually. Another gentleman approached me with a very different set of questions. And to make a long story short, I joined a development company in western Kansas that has developed a wind farm project there.
But getting to your question, we had to assure the center pivot irrigators out there that we would not put a turbine in the middle of their circle. we always had to go to the corners where we would agree, you know, that's, we won't interfere at all. Now dry land was a little different.
They can maneuver around, you know, there's no, there's no guy wires to negotiate or anything, but we had to, we had to really convince those folks that we were not going to interfere with their farming operation. Of course, it's well understood. Now there's plenty of wind farms out there that, We're not going to disrupt. We want to do minimal disruption of your agricultural operation.
That is true. It's called a lease and easement agreement. So... The lease has to do with where the turbines intersect with the ground. I want to put in a little factoid here. You know, again, I was concerned about the influence of the wind farm on our agricultural operation. This was in the early years when in I mean, believe it or not, GPS is a relatively new thing.
And they had to compensate me for precisely the acres that I could no longer graze. And I made sure that, okay, I know I'm going to lose a little bit of land because of the turbines on the ground, the access roads, and then the management O&M building that they were going to build, the operations building. And so they went around and precisely measured what was lost after it was built.
And there are 50 turbines on the Farrell Ranch. And we lost exactly 50 acres. And that includes, again, the turbines, the roads, and the O&M site. And so while we were doing it, because I was...
because I was being questioned about this, I said, let's go up to the oil field and measure where the pump jacks are, the roads are, the spillage, the tank batteries, and let's just see how much land has been lost up there. And as it turns out, it was one acre per pump jack also.
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