Gratiot County's other crop: wind

Drive east of St. Louis through Bethany Township and the horizon does something unexpected for mid-Michigan farm country: it turns. Gratiot County is Michigan’s wind-energy heavyweight — the Gratiot County Wind Project alone spins 133 turbines, the largest wind installation in the state when it came online in 2012 when it came online in 2012, and additional projects have pushed the county’s turbine count into the hundreds. The flat, steady-breeze farmland that grows beans and beets turned out to be ideal for harvesting wind, too.

What’s distinctive is how the county handled it. Rather than fighting over the towers, Gratiot’s townships planned for them early and zoned for them together, and the result has been a model other rural counties study: lease payments that help keep family farms solvent, and tax revenue that flows to schools, roads, and township budgets. The corn still grows underneath. Around here, the turbines read less like an intrusion and more like what they are — the same fields, earning twice.