Dolovo, a village near Pančevo, is today the site of an important and potentially controversial encounter.
This village, which has had a centuries-long tradition of crop farming, has in recent years also been transformed into a hub of green energy, reports Klima 101.
Since October 2019, electricity in this village has been generated by Čibuk 1, the largest wind farm in Serbia. With its 57 turbines, Čibuk 1 produces enough electricity to cover the needs of around 113,000 households - more than the entire South Banat region.
Is Dolovo an example of successful coexistence between tradition and new technology? Or are wind farms, as is increasingly and more loudly debated in Serbia due to changes they may cause in the microclimate, harmful to surrounding agricultural production?
The question is more complicated than it may appear at first glance. To try to answer it properly, we turned both to field experience and to science.
Wind turbines as a giant air mixer: field experiences
When technology unfamiliar to the local population appears in Vojvodina’s farmland, it is not unusual for scepticism, caution, and even resistance to arise - especially given the scale of the turbines.
"Into that 'cap' up there on the turbine I could drive a tractor," one farmer from Dolovo, who wished to remain anonymous, vividly explained, likely referring to the rotor housing.
Although from the ground this housing looks like a small dot on the horizon, this is an optical illusion - wind turbines are extremely large, and their impact on the immediate environment goes beyond aesthetics. The key phenomenon here is mechanical mixing of air layers.
By generating electricity from the kinetic energy of the wind, turbines act as giant mixers. For example, when warmer air is above cooler air, turbine rotation pulls upper layers downward, warming the air near the surface, and vice versa - when warmer air is below, the air is mixed in a way that can cool the ground.
Do these giant mixers harm crop yields?
Now that turbines have become a permanent part of the Serbian landscape, farmers have begun sharing direct experiences.
Residents of Padina, where the Kovačica and Pupin wind farms operate, have in recent years witnessed a noticeable decline in yields. Although the main culprit remains droughts, which are becoming more frequent and severe due to climate change, farmers from this southern Banat area also point to wind turbines as an additional factor. They have observed that turbine rotation “blows away” morning dew, depriving already dried-out crops of valuable moisture.
"Dew lasts much shorter, and sometimes it is even absent," says Pavel Brezina, president of a farmers’ association in Padina and an agricultural engineer involved in crop farming and hazelnut production. "In summer, when dew would normally be present for three to four hours in the morning, now it is reduced to maybe one hour, or there is none at all. We noticed this for practical reasons: in summer, harvesting cannot begin until the dew has lifted because wheat is wet and combines cannot handle it. In areas with wind turbines, we have observed that harvesting can always start earlier than in other parts of the village without turbines."
Under ideal conditions with sufficient rainfall, dew is not a decisive factor for plant survival. Unfortunately, such ideal conditions are increasingly rare, while severe droughts in Serbia’s changing climate are becoming more frequent. In such periods, the role of dew as a source of moisture becomes crucial.
"It is like when you are very thirsty and you take at least a sip of water," Brezina explains. "It is not enough to restore the organism, but it refreshes you slightly. Plants could also survive without dew if rainfall distribution were normal, because they would draw enough moisture from the soil. However, with a lack of soil moisture, dew can be enough to keep plants alive between two heavier rains. Simply put, in bad years with poor rainfall distribution, wind turbines make those conditions slightly worse."
The company CWP, which developed the Čibuk 1 wind farm, does not dispute this observation and notes that in a narrow zone around a turbine there may be slight evaporation of morning dew.
"On the other hand, this same air mixing brings significant benefits," the company told Klima101. "It increases the availability of carbon dioxide for plants, accelerating photosynthesis; it reduces moisture on leaves, directly preventing fungal diseases; and it provides natural protection against frost during critical nights."
However, dew displacement is not the only potentially negative consequence of wind farm operation.
"We assume with fairly high certainty that there is significantly less underground life in the soil, such as earthworms," adds Pavel Brezina from Padina. "If you have problems with moles or unwanted insects in your yard, devices are used that emit vibrations and turbulence that drive them away. The same thing may be happening here. Earthworms are a very reliable indicator of biological activity and maintain soil fertility. Still, to prove how harmful a turbine is - if it is harmful - long-term, detailed multi-year studies would be needed; these are just our observations."
Farmers also mention a range of other potential effects, such as damage to soil caused by heavy machinery during construction, changes in land value, microplastics from turbine blades, and increased noise levels.
"In impact assessments and studies that are available for review, noise from a single turbine is always mentioned," says the farmer. "But it is like an orchestra. One person is not as loud as ten or fifteen singing together. The cumulative effect is much greater. It also depends on wind direction. We hear them when the wind blows towards the settlement. Now that turbines surround us, from whatever direction the wind blows, we will hear them. This is a concern of us as a community, not only farmers."
The local impact of wind farms is not only a matter of debate between farmers and communities on one side and investors on the other. Scientific papers, such as one from China, note that turbine-induced air mixing can also raise night-time soil temperatures.
Although wind turbines in Banat and Inner Mongolia are thousands of kilometres apart, these findings suggest that any intervention in space - even a "green" one - leaves some kind of footprint.
But how deep is that footprint really - shallow or deep, negligible or significant, large or small?
The impact of wind farms on agriculture (cannot be seen with the naked eye): what science says
In a 2023 impact assessment study, researchers from the Faculty of Agriculture in Belgrade examined the effects of wind turbines on yields and grain quality on arable land within the Kovačica wind farm. The analysed crops included wheat, maize, soybeans and sunflower.
Their findings showed that during one production year (2022/2023), there was no statistically significant difference in yields or quality between plots located next to turbines and those about 100 metres away - a distance assumed to be unaffected by turbines. Any minor differences were most likely due to soil heterogeneity, the study states.
The researchers note that wind farm areas are continuously exposed to winds of varying directions and intensity (the so-called wind rose), which affects greater or lesser drying of the soil surface, especially in summer when evaporation is intensified due to high temperatures (the so-called föhn effect).
"Microclimatic changes people talk about - both negative and positive - are so subtle that the ‘average person’ cannot notice them," explains Dr Vladimir Đurđević, professor at the Faculty of Physics in Belgrade and one of Serbia’s leading meteorologists.
"All other factors related to weather and climate variability have a much stronger influence on yields and long-term yield trends than changes that occur after the construction of a wind farm," he adds.
"In practice, the impact of wind farms is largely ‘masked’ by other climatic factors, such as how precipitation is distributed in individual years, whether there were storms or hail in certain locations, how many days had temperatures above 35°C, and long-term warming trends."
That long-term warming trend increasingly brings droughts - more frequently and more intensely. These more frequent dry conditions have a measurable impact on Serbian agriculture: it has been scientifically proven that summer droughts in Serbia are now twice as frequent as in the past.
Compared with droughts affecting vast agricultural areas, the impact of wind farms is incomparably smaller.
"Changes do occur, but they are not permanent or large enough to be detected by simple observation, or more precisely by human senses," says Dr Đurđević. "Linking these phenomena to wind turbines is likely an attempt by individuals to see what they expect to see, or what simple logic might suggest."
Science has nevertheless sought answers where human senses cannot reach, examining the effects of wind farms and microclimatic changes on agricultural yields. The results vary from place to place.
A US study from last year, conducted at the level of individual plots in Iowa, reached positive conclusions: fields within an eight-kilometre radius of wind turbines recorded corn yield increases of 0.3% to 2% after wind farm construction. The authors attributed this effect - most pronounced near the facilities - to microclimatic changes caused by turbine operation, such as changes in humidity, airflow and temperature that may improve growing conditions.
According to official data, over 90% of wind turbines in the United States are located on agricultural land. This is not the only study suggesting the benefits of this symbiosis.
A comprehensive 2019 study published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management showed that these positive microclimate effects are not limited to individual plots but are also visible at the county level.
Analysing yield data and wind farm capacity across the US, Daniel Kaffine from the University of Colorado Boulder found a clear correlation: every additional 100 megawatts of installed wind capacity increases corn and other crop yields in a county by approximately 1%.
However, it remains an open question to what extent these findings can be applied to the specific conditions of our region, soil types and local microclimates.
Beyond microclimate, it is not the only “vector” through which wind farm construction may affect agricultural production. Farmers are also concerned about the scale and location of new planned projects.
In the Padina area, where our interviewee Pavel Brezina lives and works, plans reportedly include the construction of as many as ten wind farms with a total of 374 turbines, according to the Ecological Movement of Padina (EKOP).
“We already have nearly 100 turbines here, so that is enough - let it go one or two villages further,” Brezina says. “This area may be suitable because of wind, but people living here should be taken into account more. We do not want further expansion. That is what we have, that is our reality.”
Dr Đurđević sees the greatest room for improvement precisely here.
"It seems to me that sometimes non-transparency and lack of communication with local communities, as well as the absence of open dialogue about possible forms of cooperation beyond mere land purchase and adjustment of plans on an ad hoc basis, are a greater cause for concern than potential microclimatic impacts," he notes. "In that sense, education and broader involvement of the local community are crucial. Ultimately, there is enough available space, and if in some locations nature protection, other risks and concerns outweigh the benefits, there are certainly places where wind farms would not be a problem."
However, the story of "giant mixers" also has another, more profitable side. Wind farm construction has brought investment into rural roads, and farmers received up to three times the market price for purchased or leased plots from investors, according to our interviewees from Dolovo and Padina. This created an unusual opportunity: by leasing just 30 to 35 ares for a wind farm, one could buy an entire hectare of new land.
As most farmers chose to reinvest the money in land, this triggered a wave of purchases, recalls Pavel Brezina. However, he adds that the sudden inflow of capital and increased demand quickly pushed up land prices.
How large are wind farms, really?
Although turbines may appear to dominate the horizon locally, the actual on-the-ground figures tell a different story.
According to the land purchase and lease plan for the Čibuk 1 wind farm, a total of 72 hectares of land were permanently acquired for the project.
On a macro level, within Vojvodina’s vast agricultural fields - each spanning thousands of hectares - these 72 hectares are just a drop in the ocean.
Moreover, according to the latest agricultural census, Vojvodina has 28,683 hectares of unused agricultural land. This is land abandoned for various reasons, and Vojvodina has by far the lowest share of unused land in Serbia (only 1.62%).
In other words, just on unused land in Vojvodina alone, it would be possible to accommodate around 400 wind farms the size of Čibuk 1. Wind power plants are among the energy sources with the smallest land footprint, especially compared with coal-fired thermal power plants (including mining) and hydropower plants, which require 52 to 82 times more land per megawatt-hour.
"When you look at the project map, it may seem that the wind farm covers a large area,” says CWP. “That is one of the most common misconceptions. In reality, permanent land use is less than 1% to 2%. We only occupy the footprint of the turbine foundation, the access road, and a small maintenance platform. Everything else - over 98% of the land - remains available for agricultural production."
Despite this relatively small footprint, it is understandable why farmers in this region have concerns.
Čibuk 1 in Dolovo and surrounding areas is one of 13 operational wind farms in Serbia, with a total capacity of around 800 megawatts, currently accounting for about 4% of domestic electricity production.
Wind energy development in Serbia began with the first turbine in Pešter; EPS developed its first wind farm in Kostolac on a former mining spoil heap; the Crni Vrh plant in Bor and Žagubica is expected to connect to the grid soon; and further potential sites exist across the country. Nevertheless, domestic wind capacity is largely concentrated in southern Banat, one of the most fertile regions.
Although existing capacity occupies a small physical area, this concentration is another indication of insufficient planning of renewable energy development in Serbia, with its most controversial example to date being the Samoš wind farm.
Furthermore, high concentration of wind farms in one area also affects the stability of overall wind generation, as output becomes heavily dependent on weather conditions in a single region rather than being better distributed across the country.
To assess how wind capacity should be planned - and whether it affects agricultural production - we do not need to look only at our own backyard or even at studies focusing on micro-level changes in specific locations. We can also look at countries that are far ahead of us in wind energy development.
While Serbia has a double-digit number of wind farms and a few hundred turbines, Germany - one of Europe's leading agricultural producers - operates nearly 30,000 wind turbines. Germany’s wind capacity is more than 100 times larger, exceeding 70 gigawatts and producing over a quarter of its electricity.
While Serbia’s first commercial wind farm, Kula, began operation in 2015, the average age of wind farms in Germany is 15.5 years.
"In Germany and other countries, there are wind farms that have been operating for more than ten years, on much larger areas than here," notes Dr Đurđević.
"And agricultural production continues there as well. If there were any strongly negative, lasting effects on yields, they would have already surfaced. Compensation schemes for farmers would have been introduced, and wind farm designs would have been adjusted to reduce such effects. None of that is happening."
Land acquisition and use
On average, a single wind turbine with associated infrastructure occupies only about 0.3 hectares per plot, and landowners are guaranteed compensation for any crop damage during construction or maintenance.
Plots for Čibuk 1 were mostly purchased from owners at prices slightly above market value. However, farmers can continue to cultivate the land completely free of charge so that fields do not become overgrown, and they can continue to earn income as if they had never sold it.
Additionally, after the wind farm reaches the end of its operational life, the original owners or their heirs can repurchase their land for just one euro. Before that point, the project company must restore the site to its original condition. This does not only include removing the turbines, but also ploughing the land so it can continue to be used for agriculture.
Regardless of scepticism about whether such restoration is truly possible, this obligation is clearly defined in the investor’s contract.
Although the lease agreement for Čibuk 1 applies mainly to temporary storage areas, wind farm construction can also include such arrangements. In that case, farmers receive an agreed annual rent for each turbine located on their property. This form of passive income provides farmers with a kind of "financial insurance" - a stable revenue stream that does not depend on whether the year is dry or fertile, or on grain market prices.
(EUpravo zato/Klima101)
Kostolac windfarm