I sat down with Jeff Risley, who grew up on a wheat farm in western Kansas and spent his career in public affairs with energy developers as clients. One of them asked him why nobody was looking out for the farmers across the table. They had the idea, he built it. Farmers have a group for wheat and one for corn. Now they have one for electrons, and his own family has oil and gas wells on the same ground.

When a developer comes knockin about leasing ground, the farmer is negotiating something he has never done before, against people who do it every day. So Jeff’s group runs the same analysis the developer runs, on the same tools, and hands the landowner a number before the offer comes. What raises that number is not too complicated, like how close you sit to a place the grid can take the power and whether anything on it is protected. “Landowners have way more power than they think,” he told me.

He is just as blunt about how developers give that power back, deciding on a project, announcing it, then defending it when the county pushes back. I have done community engagement in these areas and that is how it goes. He is fair about it too. Some do this well, and some are two guys in a truck.

That and much more in today’s podcast episode.

Chapters

00:00 – Introduction

01:43 – What REFA does for farmers and ranchers

03:17 – The name, and how energy got politicized

06:41 – What the ground is worth, and what landowners can ask for

12:57 – How Jeff built REFA

18:38 – Membership, pricing, and advocacy

21:32 – Veterans getting into farming

24:20 – What’s squeezing farmers, and renewables as a lifeline

28:08 – Regret, and why farmers trust other farmers

29:55 – Getting in without owning land

34:30 – Why developers lose rural communities

38:53 – Social license after the project is built

41:04 – Close, and why the messenger matters

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