I don’t think it will shock anyone to find out we live in a time of division. Not a lot of people recognize what’s at work. The same forces of neoliberalism are destroying the economic prospects of regular folks in urban and rural areas alike, for people of all ethnicities, for men and women, straight and LGBTQ, for religious and unchurched...in short, for everyone outside the top 10%.
If we recognized that, we’d quickly band together against the agenda of tax cuts for the rich, financialization of business, deregulation of everything that protects the masses, crushing worker rights, and everything else that defines neoliberalism. The elites simply can’t accept such a thing.
So they stoke division. Almost 45 years after Reaganomics became a word, closer to 50 since antitrust enforcement basically started, all of 50 since wages began to stagnate, people are catching on. Not everyone, but the cracks are everywhere. From the Fight for $15 groups to the Trumpskyite radicals, there’s broad agreement the economy is rigged, but not to the point everyone agrees on who’s doing the rigging, how, or why. Still, neoliberalism is clearly in its end stage. It’s no longer enough to divide rural against urban, now it’s necessary to divide rural people against each other, and of course city people against each other as well.
Oh, and do something to mitigate Global Warming? Don’t be foolish. And rural Americans will be a little more poor as a result. Fewer family reforms will have the resources needed to stand against big, corporate farms as a result. The fat cats win another round.
Two hours northwest of the Knoches’ home is the Amerugi Farm. It’s 400 acres of corn, soybeans, barley, oats, rye and alfalfa, woodlands and pasture. It’s also home to one wind turbine that’s part of the Soldier Creek Wind Energy Center.
The wind project, which includes 120 turbines dotted across the fields of 200 participating landowners, went into operation in 2020 and today produces up to 300 megawatts of electricity, about enough for about 64,000 homes.
Mary Fund and her husband, Ed Reznicek, have farmed there since 1978 on land Fund’s family has owned since the 1870s. The one wind turbine on their land gives them a small lease payment.
“It’s a nice little addition to our retirement income, but it’s not going to make us rich,” said Fund, 70.
She views that turbine in much the same way her mother and aunt saw the oil leases on the farm in the early 1980s.
“They struck oil, so we have a couple of oil wells on our land. They helped my mother in her old age,” she said.
Indeed, across the farm country where green energy is now controversial, pump jacks and gas wells have long created a far less green kind of energy. Nemaha County is home to 22 oil wells and in 2022 produced 33,788 barrels of oil, enough to make as much as 675,000 gallons of gasoline.
The state as a whole had more than 48,000 oil wells and 19,000 natural gas wells in production in 2023.
It’s a kind of karma, Fund said. “You don’t let them extract oil from your land and then not let them put up a turbine.”
They signed a lease in July 2018 that gave a three-year option for NextEra to explore use of their land as a site for a potential turbine, but only after several months of communications with the wind farm representative, visiting other windfarms to see what it felt like to be near turbines and a lot of research.
“I really have to confess I didn’t think anybody would oppose it,” Fund said. “I mean, why would you?"
She was wrong. Things quickly got testy, much of it organized through Facebook. Speakers railed against wind, and stacks of a misinformation-filled book appeared on the counters of local businesses and libraries all winter long.
“It was never clear who brought these into the county, but the website of South Dakotans for Safe & Responsible Renewable Energy offers a case of 30 for $1,000 donations,” she said.
The furor over the plan made the couple enemies in the place they’d lived together for 45 years, the place where Fund grew up.
“There are people who don’t talk to each other anymore, and people who grudgingly moved on and talk about everything but the wind farm,” she said. “I’ve got a neighbor who won’t talk to me, but her husband will.”
In the end, Nemaha County commissioners voted to approve the wind farm in 2019. It was built in 2020 and now brings about $900,000 in taxes to the county each year.
That’s on top of the lease payments made directly to landowners including Fund and Reznicek.
Living near the turbines hasn’t bothered the couple. On quiet nights, they can hear both the turbine and the oil wells.
But theirs seems likely to be the last wind power project that will be built in Nemaha County. After the first conditional-use permits were approved in early 2019, the county commission passed a moratorium on new projects in May 2019.
In October 2023, they passed a resolution extending the moratorium for another year. A new County Comprehensive Plan documents opposition to further wind energy and effectively warns off developers.