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
And that also helped lower my stress factor. I'm like, okay, they look like large plants out there to me. And I actually asked him, instead of putting them in straight rows, would you weave them a little bit, make them follow the contour of the land, make them look like they're a little more natural here, even though they are huge machines.
The red lights are an interesting thing, and that has come up in Kansas quite a bit. It is now, and this is interesting, it is now required that the red lights will be radar triggered. In other words, the only time we need those lights is when there's an aircraft within, I don't know, five miles or whatever it has to be. So all the new wind farms in Kansas are now, I believe, and again, I don't,
I think this is correct. The new ones have to be fitted with a radar triggered lights so that the lights only come on when there's aircraft in the area. And then the pre-existing wind farms like ours, the next time they have to replace the lights, they'll put in the radar triggering modem. So that's going to help with the light pollution, I hope. So I think that's a great idea personally.
That's a great question. And again, the developer, Sandy, when we signed up, he started measuring. They brought in a company, environmental company, West, I think was the name of it. Anyway, they started measuring all the wildlife that's out there. Three years prior to construction. And the canary in our coal mine is the greater prairie chicken. That's the bird.
Well, that is kind of symbolic of the health of the tall grass prairie. It's a ground nesting bird. And so we measured the birds prior to construction and sure enough, and we knew this would happen during construction, they disappeared. There's just too much activity out there, but then they back, they gradually phased back in and they ended the study in 2011.
So that would have been six years after building it because our per chicken population had recovered to pre-construction levels and And admittedly, thanks to John and my management, we do everything we can to mitigate the effects of the wind farm. And we did things intentionally with our ranch management to make sure the habitat for the prairie chicken was healthy.
We don't burn as much as our neighbors, for example, in the spring especially. which is when they're nesting. So we did everything we could to make sure the birds stayed healthy. I was also advised by several ecologists to watch for those animals that depend on hearing for their safety. One of those animals is the jackrabbit. He's got to hear the coyote coming.
And does our jackrabbit population stay up and good? And it is. We have an abundance of deer. So we're looking to the wildlife here to tell us, do we have a healthy ecosystem? And the signals are good for us. So the wind farm, did it have an effect? Yes, everything has an effect. Yeah, it had an effect. I'm sure it did.
But those keystone species that we're watching, specifically the greater prairie chicken and those jackrabbits, those populations have remained healthy. Oh, back to the bird kill. Yeah, they studied, let's see, for three years after the park was built, I would see the students out there with hard hats on, and they would do a spiral walk from the base out of the turbine.
In three years of study, they never found one dead bird, not one. Now, we're not in a fly path here. We're not in a migratory path, but they finally quit looking after three years.
We do. Our house is about a mile from the closest turbine, and the wind farm is to the west and south of us. So that's the prevailing wind. Some nights we will hear what sounds like either a river or a surf. And, you know, if you take a broomstick and swipe it through the air really fast, that's the sound we're hearing is the blades cutting through the air.
We don't hear a mechanical sound, but we hear kind of a whooshing in the distance. Like I said, it resembles a river or the surf in the distance. And so we do hear that. We've had mechanical sounds. And of course, like if there's something wrong with a turbine, We call the manager and say, hey, number 23 is putting out a squeak. You need to get it oiled or whatever.
And they will typically handle any kind of abnormal mechanical sounds that are coming from the turbines. Now, when you're at the base of the turbine, yes, you do hear the rotor sound. You can hear that. You can hear a mechanical sound when you're at the base of the turbines.
Well, again, my mind, you know, I would want to know, is it going to impair? And that's my first question. That's why my hard no came out was like, I don't want to do anything that impairs my capacity to continue my agricultural enterprises here. I don't want that. And again, at the end of the day.
It didn't impair it, except I did lose, like I said, one acre per turbine was lost off of this ranch. But then, of course, the economic impact back to me more than made up for that. You know, and I think that everybody has to have... Tanner, I don't blame the ranchers who say, no, I don't want this. That's entirely their prerogative to say, you know, I'm just not comfortable with this. I don't...
wanted or needed. I, you know, I just don't, I'm not very evangelical about this. I don't, I don't, I don't like, I don't push it on anybody. And I don't, there are a lot of people that don't want to see any more wind farms in the Flint Hills. And okay, that's fine. There's plenty of ground in Western Kansas where they want them. So let's do that.
I did Tanner and I want to applaud you for the work you're doing to help, uh, enlighten your, your listeners to a possibility. And, um, you know, I wish you all well, this is, this, this is not easy work we do, but I create, I feel privileged to have the opportunity to work as I have.
Uh, I prefer an email, uh, uh, contact would be best from my point of view. And, uh, I'll be glad to recite my email or will you put that up or how do you, how do you manage that?
Great. It's G P Farrell, my last name, F E R R E L L three, the number three at gmail.com. So it's gpferrell3 at gmail.com.
Happy to help. Thanks for having me.
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