In 2014, an Iowa dairy farmer added a 10-kW wind turbine and two solar arrays to his farm; he reported $5

Yoder runs a small dairy farm in Frytown, Iowa, where farming Jersey cows and operating a small dairy had long been the family’s steady routine. In 2014, that routine stayed the same, according to a ClimateWire report republished by the Governors’ Wind Energy Coalition. What changed that year was what sat next to the barn. Yoder added a 10 kW wind turbine on a steel tower, tall enough to be one of the more noticeable structures in the area outside the local grain elevator, along with two 7.2 kW solar arrays angled across a south-facing slope of a nearby field. Combined, the equipment carried a nameplate capacity of 24.4 kW, and on one particularly strong day of sun and wind together, Yoder reported an instantaneous output of more than 20,000 watts, a peak reading rather than a steady average. The payoff showed up on his power bill: $500 to $700 in avoided energy costs in a typical month at the time, roughly half what he had been paying before, though the exact figure moved with the weather and with how much power the farm was drawing.The setup paired a turbine with two solar arraysThe Yoder system was constructed to function as a team of components rather than independent power sources. The wind turbine collected energy where the solar panels were not able to collect during overcast or cloudy conditions, while the solar arrays collected energy where there was no wind.

This helped Yoder’s small-scale, longtime dairy farm produce significant amounts of its own power without stopping milk collection operations. Yoder was direct about his motivation, ClimateWire reported. He liked renewable energy, he said, but what actually got the equipment installed was that the numbers worked.A local co-op’s pricing structure paid offThe economic logic of Yoder’s savings comes down to the fact that the source is a 650-member utility company known as the Farmers Electric Cooperative, located in Kalona and run by long-time general manager Warren McKenna. A feed-in tariff was introduced where members bought all their power from the utility company as per the normal arrangement, but sold all their produced energy back to the co-op at predetermined prices.

Solar arrays angled across a south-facing slope of a nearby field. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons

During that period, Farmers Electric Cooperative used a feed-in tariff that paid higher rates for the first units of power produced. The farmers who opted out of the program were instead given a one-time financial incentive tied to installed capacity, capped at a certain amount.Yoder was part of a broader shift already underway in the areaThe story of Yoder’s farm was not an exception. At the time when the story appeared in ClimateWire, around 24 other families in Johnson, Washington, and Iowa counties had already started dedicating portions of their own lands either to solar panels or wind power facilities. Together, these projects helped Farmers Electric Cooperative rank among the leaders in solar watts per member, reaching 1,800 watts per customer. The Solar Electric Power Association later named McKenna utility CEO of the year for creating a “national model” of community solar financing. Overall, the cooperative had installed 1.2 MW of solar capacity, covering 30 percent of members’ peak load needs in a state better known for wind power.Federal support has backed similar projects across IowaSchemes like the one used by Farmers Electric helped farmers save money on renewable technology. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Energy for America Program has provided funding for wind and solar energy projects similar to those in the past few years on American farms, as per the project data collected by USDA Rural Development. These grants include a 100-kW solar farm at a Dubuque County pig farm that is expected to save its operators an estimated $17,000 annually, and a 348.5-kW solar farm on a dairy farm in Winneshiek County. Incentives for individual farmers vary from year to year, but the basic model used in Yoder’s case has continued to spread across rural Iowa beyond the original Mennonite and Amish farms around Kalona.