People say you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.
The truth is, you knew what you had,
you just never thought you’d lose it.
As one drives through Mid-Missouri, one thing that can’t be missed is the beautiful wooded areas and acres and acres of pasture and farmland. Depending on the time of year, you will likely see crops filling those fields and cattle roaming those pastures. No matter how you lean on dietary preferences, those fields represent food.
To many, those views are what rural life is all about. The countryside, the cattle, and the wildlife are what make our drive home and our views from our homes after a long day or long life of hard work, our happy place. Imagining our drive, or our view looking any other way is inconceivable to most.
Unfortunately, if renewable energy companies, motivated by huge tax-payer-funded government subsidies, get their way, the landscape of rural Missouri will be changed forever. Or at least for the next 40 years. Most people have no clue what nightmare is on the horizon, hence why this website was created.
Here are some jolting numbers for residents of the central Missouri area to look forward to if the rampant leasing off of our beautiful countryside to solar and wind farms becomes a reality:
There are currently 8,828 acres or nearly 14 square miles, leased for solar farms in Callaway County. (as of June 2023)
There are currently 30,000 acres leased in Audrain County for 100 nearly 400 ft. tall wind turbines (as of March 2023)
Those are just the numbers that are known. More companies crop up every day, sending out their letters with promises of rosy goodness to entice unsuspecting or woefully ignorant landowners to give up their land for the next 20 to 40 years.
Sadly, some people, either from naivete’ in their senior years, ignorance from lack of research about the ‘green’ products being pushed as the savior of our climate and electrical grid, or just plain greed, have decided that taking the gamble of leasing out their land to out-of-state big-city corporations for decades, with no proven history of keeping their promises, is a good idea.
“No one has seen one of these [solar] projects run its course. You know, they’ve never gotten one up and going and then decommissioned it and tore the panels back out to know what the long-term effects are. And it’s a lot of the unknowns that really are scary.” ~ Brad Cochran, a third-generation farmer
The ones who will suffer and learn if their neighbors’ decision was a good one, will, unfortunately, be the neighboring homeowners. Those whose view and sounds were once of pasture, farmland, woods, and wildlife, will be replaced by ugly, noisy, fenced-in seas of solar panels, 160 ft. tall transmission towers, new substations that will need to be built, or nearly 400 ft. tall giant wind turbines. The unluckiest ones will have two or more of these industrial projects around their property.
The views and sounds of nature that make rural life so appealing being lost will be awful enough for most, but add in the fact that there can be negative health consequences associated with living so close to these projects. And if you do have any negative health effects from living too close to these projects, or just get tired of the noise and your back patio experience being ruined, good luck selling your home/property. Realtors in other states that have already experienced the house market effects of these industrial green projects have gone on record saying there is a loss in value of those homes and they tend to sit on the market longer.
As more and more projects are being built and more people are being exposed, people are finding these ‘green’ projects have a dark side that the developers and those in government don’t want to admit to. Too much money is involved in too many pockets for this negative press to get out and ruin the money flow for a lot of people, but it’s out there and throughout this site, we’ll be sharing it.
Besides potential health problems these projects can cause, grid instability issues caused by the unpredictability of weather, as well as technology advancements potentially making today’s current renewable energy outdated in a few years, let’s take a look at the best and worst-case scenarios.
In the best-case scenario, the companies are all 100% legitimate and will keep all of their many promises to the landowners. All of the prime farmland taken out of production won’t cause any food shortages, or be harmed in any way, and at the end of the 20 to 40-year leases, the land is put back like it was and farming or grazing can quickly resume.
However, the rightfully scary, and worst-case scenario, is when it becomes painfully obvious that we cannot rely on ‘green’ renewable energy to supply 100% of our electrical needs. That will cause our electrical grid to be unreliable with no gas or coal backup left to step in when needed. Add in potential problems associated with the construction of industrial solar farms like erosion, water runoff, soil and water contamination.
Another worst-case scenario involves the government subsidies drying up, causing these companies to go bankrupt or stop maintenance on these projects. That leaves an apocalyptic landscape of thousands of wind turbines and millions of solar panels and all their components left sitting idle. Those idle or broken wind turbines and solar panels, which will be too much for the average farmer or landowner to deal with, will be left to decompose and wreak havoc on millions of acres of heavily compacted, topsoil-free, former food-producing land.
While having control over what you do on your own property has always been a good thing, nobody really expected that one day that freedom would come back to bite us all. For those not familiar, most of the solar panels in the world currently come from China. China isn’t exactly our good friend and probably isn’t the best choice for products containing no telling what kind of harmful things that will be covering thousands and thousands of acres of our precious prime farmland, usually near lakes, ponds, streams, or creeks, in Missouri.
Unfortunately, Missouri is only one state of many seeing the exact same sneaky tactics that these renewable energy companies are using to put up their not-so-green or earth-friendly products. It’s also happening in many other states. While some of us will be gone in 40 years, you have to wonder what the scene will look like for those still in the area. Will the fields and nearby waterways around all those sites be well-kept and bustling with life, or will they be an apocalyptic wasteland?
Are wind and solar still going to be the best solution we have for ‘green renewable energy’ in 10 years, let alone 40? We’ve got robots patrolling cities in some states, yet somehow some people think better technology that uses less land and generates more reliable clean energy than weather-dependent wind and solar with less waste or damage to the environment isn’t on the horizon?
Whether you are currently directly affected or not by any of the proposed wind, solar, or transmission lines, surely you can see how letting our county and prime farmland be turned into a renewable energy industrial mess is a terrible idea. A few people who have sold out to big corporations for their own gains have opened the door to ALL OF US suffering with the potentially catastrophic consequences of their actions.
The only way we can stop this potential nightmare from becoming a reality is for everyone reading this to stand up and loudly be heard often by everyone in our local and state government. If they don’t hear from members of the community, they just (wrongly) assume that the residents don’t mind, even though most don’t even know this is happening.
Make sure your large-acreage-owning neighbors know that you don’t want to live next to a potentially dangerous industrial green project. There is plenty of evidence about how un-green and potentially dangerous these projects are provided on our ‘FACTS‘ and ‘TESTIMONIALS‘ pages to show them. By the time they are built and your property value and health are potentially affected, it will be too late.
There are better ways out there to save the planet than by destroying millions of acres of nature and the plants, trees, and farmland that provide oxygen and food for us. The only way those in power and control will look for those better ways is if those of us that will have to live directly with their poor decisions make it loud and clear that we don’t want it in our communities.
Stand up and fight with us or we will all dearly pay the price for what will undoubtedly be one of the worst decisions in the history of the U.S.