How much land wind turbines take up on a farm
A landowner deciding whether to sign a wind lease wants to know how much land wind turbines take up on a farm, not how much land sits inside the project boundary on a map. The Department of Agriculture measured that directly. Researchers drew a 150 meter zone, about 490 feet, around every turbine in the national wind turbine database and tracked the ground inside it from 2009 to 2020, comparing the 3 years before each turbine went up to the 3 years after. The turbine pad, the clearing around it and the service road together covered about 88,000 acres nationally in 2020, against about 897 million acres of land in farms nationally. That is about 0.05% of farmland across the country. Almost all the rest of a wind project stays open, kept clear so the spinning blades of one turbine never reach the next, and is left for whatever the land was already growing or grazing.
Why the land inside the fence keeps producing
Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a government laboratory, reached the same conclusion from a different angle, peer reviewed in 2022. Mapping 1,089 wind plants against the National Land Cover Database, they estimate that 96% to more than 99% of the land inside a typical wind farm carries no turbine, pad or road at all. Turbines have also grown larger and are now spaced farther apart than they used to be, so the power packed into every square kilometer of a wind project fell 68% since 2000. A wind lease mostly pays for the right to build on a small share of a field, not the whole field.
Any change counts any shift in land cover at all, not only land leaving agriculture entirely. Wind sites that left agriculture entirely measured less than 1%, shown here as 1 since the source states no more precise figure. Solar figures are the same measurement, for comparison, not a separate claim this article makes about solar.
Show the numbers
| Wind any change | 5 |
| Solar any change | 26 |
| Wind left farming | 1 |
| Solar left farming | 15 |
Cropland stays cropland more than pasture range does
The clearest test of whether that land stays in use is the Department of Agriculture own before and after count, tracking the same acres from 3 years before a project was installed to 3 years after. Nationally, land cover changed at all on only 5% of wind turbine sites, against 26% of solar sites measured the identical way, and less than 1% of wind sites that started out as farmland left agriculture entirely by 3 years later, against 15% for solar. Broken out by land type, of 11,208 wind sites that were continuous cropland before installation, 99% remained cropland 3 years after. Of 8,352 sites that were pasture range only, 92% remained pasture range only. The 2 figures are reported here separately, not blended into 1 number, because cropland held its use more reliably than pasture range did.
Measured from 3 years before a wind turbine or solar project was installed to 3 years after, tracking the same acres. The wind sample covers 11,208 cropland sites and 8,352 pasture range sites among 20,784 turbines installed 2012 to 2017.
Show the numbers
| Wind cropland | 99 |
| Wind pasture range | 92 |
| Solar cropland | 82 |
| Solar pasture range | 73 |
Farming around a wind turbine, in practice
Kelly Nieuwenhuis, a row crop farmer in Primghar, Iowa, hosts 2 turbines that took about 2 acres out of production on his farm and pays him roughly 25,000 dollars a year in lease payments from MidAmerican Energy. He farms the rest of the field around the turbines the same way he always has.
For the last four years, the turbines were the most profitable part of my farm.
Kelly Nieuwenhuis, a row crop farmer in Primghar, Iowa. Source 3.
The Department of Energy own guide to leasing land for wind tells landowners plainly that land surrounding a turbine can continue to be used to raise cattle, grow crops, or for other agricultural purposes, and that a lease can include a separate payment for any crop damaged during construction. The wind industry pays landowners an estimated 706 million dollars a year in lease income nationally, an average of 6,700 dollars for every megawatt installed, money earned from land that mostly keeps doing what it was already doing.