A new kind of farm goes into operation today in Missouri. It doesn’t require any seed….any fertilizer..any livestock….and its product is guaranteed a market. The crop is almost always there. Building devices to harvest it properly has taken about eighteen months. The harvesting machinery is 250 feet high. There are 27 of the devices. And the crop they harvest is the wind.
The Bluegrass Ridge Wind Farm near King City, northeast of St. Joseph, is the first of its kind in Missouri. It’s the brainchild of Tom Carnahan and his associates. Carnahan says nobody thought a wind farm would work in Missouri when he started out. Now, he says, there are other developers looking at the same area.
Carnahan says a lot of the farmers in the area think the project is just an extension of things their grandparents did, except that instead of windmills pumping water, giant turbines will be generating electricity.
The farm will produce 57 megawatts of electricity. Missouri’s electric cooperatives are buying all of it from this farm as well as three others Carnahan and his partners are building in the area.
A smaller project is selling power to the community of Rock Port.