I had a client last spring who was comparing two nearly identical wheat sections outside Moro. Same rolling ground, same class of soil, same distance from Highway 97. One was priced almost double the other per acre. He assumed the seller was just testing the market. He wasn't. The higher-priced section sat inside an active turbine string. The lower one didn't.
That gap is the whole story of land economics in Sherman County right now, and it's the piece that doesn't show up when you're scrolling median prices on a listing site. Wheat yield used to be the number that mattered most out here. Now it's whether your parcel sits on the right side of a wind lease boundary.
Why two identical wheat sections don't price the same
Sherman County farms wheat and barley on a summer fallow system, because the county only gets about 11 inches of rain a year. Half the ground sits idle in any given season so it can store moisture for the next crop, and even with careful conservation practices, farmers only capture around 42 percent of that moisture during the fallow period. Translation: a wheat section here produces a real crop roughly every other year, and what that crop is worth depends on futures prices the farmer doesn't control.
That's a volatile income stream to build a land valuation on. It always has been. What's changed since the early 2000s is that a second, steadier income stream has been layered on top of the wheat, and it doesn't care whether the fallow year was wet or dry.
How wind income actually arrived here
The first wind farm in the county went into service in 2002. Since then, Sherman County has become one of the densest wind corridors in the Pacific Northwest. The Klondike Wind Farm, a 321 megawatt project four miles southeast of Wasco, and the 450 megawatt Biglow Canyon Wind Farm to the north are the two most established. Both were built by what's now Avangrid Renewables, part of the Iberdrola group, using a mix of Siemens and GE turbines.
The newest addition is Golden Hills, 51 turbines generating 200 megawatts, which reached commercial operation on April 29, 2022. According to Avangrid's own announcement, Golden Hills was the company's seventh wind project in Sherman County and eleventh in Oregon. Seven projects from one developer in one small county is not a pilot program. It's infrastructure that's been building for two decades and shows no sign of stopping.
None of that history changes what wheat is worth per bushel. It does change what the ground underneath the turbines is worth to whoever owns it, because that landowner now has a second revenue line that doesn't depend on rainfall.
Owning the ground and farming the ground are not the same deal
Here's the detail that catches buyers off guard more than any acreage figure: a wind lease pays the landowner, not the farmer working the ground, and those aren't always the same person in Sherman County's tenant-heavy farm economy.
Dave Pinkerton, whose family has farmed ground near Moro since his great-grandfather settled it in 1889, put it plainly to a reporter a few years back. He was able to negotiate his own wind lease terms because he owns roughly half the acreage his ranch cultivates. A tenant farmer working leased ground doesn't get that same seat at the table, and depends on staying in the landlord's good graces to keep farming at all.
"I was in a position to negotiate, because we own some of our own ground," Pinkerton said. "But the farmer who's leasing ground doesn't benefit."
That distinction matters enormously if you're buying. A parcel with an existing turbine and an active lease isn't just land, it's land with a contract attached, and you need to know whether that contract transfers to you at closing, what term is left on it, and what the annual payment actually is before you can compare it honestly to a parcel without one.
It's not only the big utility-scale projects either. The Hilderbrand family built their own small community wind farm, PaTu Wind Farm, on their Sherman County property, six 1.5 megawatt turbines that have been feeding the grid since December 2010. A landowner doesn't need a 51-turbine utility contract to capture this kind of income. Smaller, resident-owned projects have been part of the county's wind economy for over a decade.
What the tax windfall tells you about scale
The private lease payments are only half of it. The public side shows up in county tax revenue, and the number is large relative to how small this county is. In 2020 alone, wind projects generated $12.8 million in property tax revenue for Sherman County, according to reporting from The Other Oregon. That's one of the highest per-capita wind tax hauls in the state, and it's funded school upgrades, road maintenance, and county capital projects that a county this size and this thinly populated would never generate from wheat alone.
That level of public revenue doesn't happen unless the private lease payments underneath it are also substantial. The county's own wind farms page notes that annual lease payments to property owners, alongside jobs and property tax revenue, are the direct local benefits of hosting these projects. When the public treasury is pulling in eight figures a year from turbine taxes, the private landowners holding those leases are seeing meaningful checks too.
What this actually means if you're pricing two parcels side by side
Current listings this year put Sherman County land anywhere from roughly $141,000 to $205,000 per acre on average across active marketplaces, but that range is wide precisely because it's blending two different kinds of asset. A dryland wheat section with no lease is priced on crop potential and comparable sales. A section inside a turbine footprint is priced on crop potential plus a capitalized income stream that behaves nothing like wheat revenue.
Before you compare two parcels on price alone, ask:
- Is there an existing wind lease on this parcel, and does it transfer to a new owner at closing, or is it a personal contract with the current landowner?
- What's the remaining term on the lease, and what's the actual annual payment, not just the headline turbine count?
- Does the turbine footprint reduce farmable acreage meaningfully, or is it a small pad-and-access-road impact on an otherwise full crop base?
- How is the parcel classified for county tax assessment, since farm-use valuation rules treat conservation and lease-encumbered ground differently than straight cropland?
- Is this a utility-scale contract like Klondike or Golden Hills, or a smaller resident-owned arrangement like PaTu, since the negotiating leverage and payment structure differ between the two?
None of those questions show up in a per-acre average. All of them are the reason two sections that look identical on a plat map can carry very different value, and very different cash flow, once you understand what's actually priced into each one.
If you're comparing Sherman County to somewhere else in Eastern Oregon
I work across Wasco County too, where the pricing story is almost the mirror image of this one. Out there, it's water rights and certificate numbers that separate a premium parcel from an average one, not wind leases. Sherman County's version of that hidden variable is turbine income, and it's just as invisible on a listing sheet until someone walks you through it.
If you're weighing a Sherman County parcel against acreage elsewhere in the region, the honest comparison isn't wheat yield to wheat yield. It's asking what unseen income stream, if any, is layered on top of the crop, and who actually gets paid when it lands.
If you're looking at ground in Sherman County and want help reading what's actually priced into a listing, reach out to Tiffany Hillman to start your Eastern Oregon search. I'll walk the lease details with you before you write an offer, not after.
