Last week on a flight back from Boston I read a great article in enRoute Magazine about a Danish wind farmer.

These are good times for Jørgen Tranberg, an independent farmer on the tiny Danish island of Samsø. Still sturdy and fair-haired in his 50s, Tranberg makes for a gruffly congenial guide as he shows me around his farm, punctuating his thickly accented English with rhetorical bursts of “yes, yes?” His 130 head of cattle produce milk for a farmer-owned co-operative on the mainland. (“Here is where they’re feeding, yes, yes?”) He also grows potatoes – historically Samsø’s most famous crop – along with organic onions and a small patch of pumpkins.

It’s his newest cash cow, however, that allowed Tranberg to outfit the kitchen in his traditional half-timbered farmhouse with state-of-the-art stainless-steel appliances. We hop in his tractor and drive out past the cow pasture and onion field to take a closer look, arriving at the base of a slim white tower 50 metres tall, crowned with a three-bladed rotor that whirs in the stiff breeze. This is the combination scythe and silo with which Tranberg harvests his other crop. More precisely, it is a one-megawatt wind turbine, and Jørgen Tranberg is a wind farmer.

Read the entire article (3 pages) online at enRoute Magazine.

Article and photos by Chris Turner. Used with permission of enRoute Magazine.