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
To get around to answering the question here, I've already been approached about extending this lease because it seems to me, well, I know they are considering going to the next generation of turbines on the Farrell Ranch.
And that that is in place with our agreement. Furthermore, the county required the developer of the feral ranch here. It's called the Elk River Wind Farm. The county required them to post a decommissioning bond in case they would go bankrupt or whatever. The county didn't want to have to deal with all this machinery. And so there's a bond in place.
But I'm told the salvage value of the steel and the materials would easily pay for the salvage of the turbines if they were to come down. May I ask why you're not going to put in a new wind lease on that land?
Okay. Well, it's just curious. They've had that, that, uh, royalty income for all these years. Um, I'd like to keep – I'm going to negotiate with our developer to extend it, but I'm kind of back in the mix again of having to think this through because, well, I'm considering an agreement that's going to outlive me, quite frankly. And I'm consulting my successors.
My two children will inherit – well, I always tell them what my father told me, we don't own this place. We're just the caretakers here for a while. So they are actually going to be trustees rather than owners, but they'll get the economic benefit of the ranch and they love it as their ancestral home. But, um, they chose not, not to go into ranching. So, but anyway, uh, I want to keep it going.
Furthermore, as I shared with you, um, I've still got a significant debt to pay. Um, and you know, I, uh, I needed to find another form of income. I mean, that was one of the pressures on me was like, can I keep up the 15-hour days that I was working? And so I was highly incented to find another form of income here because I knew I couldn't keep that up, Tanner.
I knew I couldn't keep working like that. And so when the wind farm came, I let go of all the extra leased ground because I didn't need to work that hard. I didn't want to work that hard. And so it just came back to the core of the ranch. And so between my livestock operation and the wind farm, man, I could sleep at night.
Um, we've not discovered that. Um, Regarding the access roads, it actually – and I didn't see this one coming, Tanner. We actually rut – imagine, I mean, one of the things we don't want to do is rut our pastures when we go out to feed. We've got livestock everywhere. And so imagine, I mean, we can now get to more areas of the ranch –
without rutting the pastures so we can go out there on the service road, get to the livestock, feed them, get back on the service road. And so it's been a net plus for us, you know, in ranching at least. I know that wouldn't be a positive in farming, but for us, that was a big deal. The other thing we do here also is that this is a burn culture.
The native, the tallgrass prairie is typically burned, you know, every two to three years. And so, you know, we do tell them if we're going to burn it because there's an area around the turbines of about, you know, probably 20, maybe 20, 30 foot radius where they got clean gravel and it can't burn right up to the base of the turbine.
It's not an issue, but we also have wildfires occasionally that are not intentional. And of course, everybody has to scramble when that happens. But there's been basically no impairment. Well, let me back up. Certainly during construction, it was pretty chaotic. So I don't want to lie about that. It's unbelievable to me. They built this wind farm in six months flat.
They broke ground in May and they were done by the end of November. But during that time, I mean, this ranch employs... two people, maybe two and a half full-time equivalents. And so we're out here pretty much alone. But during that time, we had 200 workmen on the ranch every day. They, um, And it was it was a challenge to work around all of that during construction.
But then once construction was over again, we go back to their employees, our employees. It was a good mix. But so that was probably the greatest inconvenience we had. We use stock dogs a lot, and I didn't know this, but John Wagner uses stock dogs way more than I did.
And he notices that when they're in the turban area, the dogs may get a little confused because they're probably hearing a high-pitched whine that we can't. He says they're not quite as responsive. So there's that. But in terms of livestock behavior around the turbines, we don't see anything. They don't seem to be disturbed whatsoever by the presence of the turbines.
The one thing, again, this is a treeless prairie. We do develop a cow sundial on the hot days because they'll line up in the shadow of the turbine and continue to follow that during the heat. So it's kind of humorous. There's a little pushing and shoving as they all try to get in the shadow of the turbine going out there. We've seen we've got several pictures of that. It's kind of funny.
The only other thing that I've experienced is that you really don't want to take. a green Colt out there because as the shadow of the blade comes around, uh, that horse is going to jump over the shadow, like a, uh, jumping rope each time it comes around. So we've got humorous stories about that kind of thing, you know, but it has not impaired our capacity to ranch whatsoever.
It, it has, it has been, um, we just, you know, again, the, the, the service crews have been great to work with. Um, And, again, that goes back to kind of know who you're going to do business with. And, of course, you can't predict who they're going to sell to. And that's where I'm recommending go with a company that's probably going to stay with you from beginning to end if you can.
Find somebody who's got longevity in the business and has a good reputation.
Well, that's a great question, Tanner, and that's the one that – I must say that I don't blame those who say, I just don't want to look at them. There is there, you know, it really comes back to who owns the view shed of this country, you know, and I don't have an answer for that. I really don't. There are things that I would oppose if neighbors were trying to do next to me. So I,
I actually have empathy for those who question that, the view of them. I don't blame you. Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The other thing Sandy did for me before we built it was he had me go out and take a 360-degree view, a picture of the ranch, and then he superimposed the turbines on the land before it was built. So I could literally see what it was going to look like.
Showing 81–100 of 120 · page 5 of 6
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