Utility easements threaten livelihoods, control over land
For more than six decades, Jeremy Louder’s family has farmed and ranched the land around Stanton, Texas, building a prosperous agricultural operation in a region where oil wells and pipelines share space in the West Texas oil patch with cotton and grain farming.
One of those enterprises is Louder’s 2J Farms Inc., a farm that produces cotton, wheat, alfalfa, milo, and sorghum-sudangrass, along with Hereford-Angus cross cattle.
His family has owned and farmed the land for 62 years, and Louder has personally lived and worked there for 43. He holds a degree in agricultural economics and has been recognized as Conservation Farmer of the Year. And while the business has grown substantially, so too have the challenges of farming in an energy-rich region.
“We’re in the heart of oil and gas, and we’re dealing with pipelines and oil wells, and we’ve got a lot of stuff going on out here,” Louder said in an exclusive interview with Liberty Matters. “We’ve got pivot irrigation, we’ve got dry land. Cotton, wheat, [and] alfalfa are the three main crops. We’re about 25 percent irrigated, 75 percent dry land.”
Now, however, a jolt of proposed high-voltage electrical transmission projects is threatening to disrupt Louder’s legacy. Louder says the proposed 765-kV transmission lines that would scissor through the state raise questions not only about the future productivity and value of his farmland but also about the ability of private landowners to defend their property against utilities exercising eminent domain powers.
Louder laid out the extent of the threat to ranching and farming in the area this past January, in written testimony to the Public Utility Commission (PUC) of Texas on behalf of the Stanton Farmers Co-Op Alliance. At the time, approximately 13,000 acres of 2J Farms alone were in the path of Oncor Electric Delivery Company’s proposed 765-kV Longshore-to-Drill Hole transmission route, and Louder wrote that he was far from the only one affected.
“The impact to the property and neighboring community will cause yield loss on crops and potentially could cause issues with the only cotton gin in this area,” he wrote. “The yield loss will also relate to financial losses for both the gin and cotton producers in the area. Traffic congestion will also be a concern, in an area that struggles with congestion currently. The potential loss of irrigation water will limit land use, reduce land for crops, and potentially decrease taxes collected by local entities like the county and the school.”
Catastrophic impacts to the community, in other words.
Threat to Productive Irrigated Farmland
Ultimately, the commission selected a different route that avoided the properties Louder and the alliance had sought to protect. But Louder’s entanglement with Oncor, the transmission company, was far from over.
Another 765-kV route, associated with the Dinosaur-to-Longshore project, would cross a separate farm he owns in Erath County. Meanwhile, he says, five additional properties could be affected by three other transmission routes involving 345-kV lines. Two of those routes are all irrigated farmland.
For a farmer already accustomed to dealing with condemnation threats, Louder says this run at his livelihood via the threat of eminent domain is by far the worst: “I’ve done pipelines and dealt with condemnation and all the different things, but this by far was the worst experience I’ve ever had with eminent domain,” he said.
Louder says the Dinosaur-to-Longshore project poses an immediate and potentially more damaging problem on his Erath County property. For one thing, the line would run through the middle of highly productive irrigated ground.
“They threw me into the route after the fact and I’m on the line,” he said. “ … They’re cutting the property right in half. I’ve got a 200-acre tract. They’re running right over my irrigation wells.”
And that places a big question mark over the future of those wells, Louder says.
“I think I can use that well, but if something ever happens to that water well, the way the water district rules are, I can replace that well, no questions asked, but with that 765 line there, I cannot drill a new water well underneath it,” he said.
The bottom line is, Louder says, he’s not going to get a well replacement variance that the water district otherwise allows because of the 765 line.
“And it’s a 200-foot right of way,” he said. “I’m not a hundred percent sure how close I have to be to the old well, but 200 feet is too far.”
Even if they do allow him to drill a new well, Louder says that means all new infrastructure would be needed, and at a premium.
“I’ll have to put new pipe in, new electrical wire to run over to this new location because I can’t put it close to that existing power or the water line,” he said.
Louder said there’s a lot of expense in irrigating land, and, if you can’t use the water, you’re not going to recover that expense.
“You can expect to spend a quarter of a million dollars in improvements to irrigate that land,” he said. “And if they take that ability away from you, they’re not going to compensate you for the lost income for 20 or 30 years. You’ll be lucky if they compensate you for the equipment that you’ll never recover your money back from.
The difference between irrigated and dryland production is particularly significant in West Texas.
“If you go from irrigated to dry land out here, you cut your income probably 70 percent,” he said.
What’s more, the consequences could extend far beyond the cost of irrigation and wells.
“That property’s worth a lot of money and they’re fixing to devalue it a lot because it’s not going to have the value after you put that line on it,” he said. “I fully expect it to devalue it probably 65 to 70 percent.”
From a day-to-day perspective, Louder said transmission structures reduce efficiency by limiting the use of portions of the land. Taken all together, what appears to be a relatively narrow transmission corridor would actually have cascading negative impacts that would ripple across the farm and the region.
“I’ve got multiple places with transmission lines, and Oncor will tell you that there’s a lot of things you can’t do on their right of way that you can do, but they’re by far the hardest to work with,” he said. “They’re just an independent bunch, and anytime they come in and do any type of maintenance and stuff like that, they don’t consider the weather, the time of the year, or harvest or anything like that.”
Crops are damaged, Louder said.
“And then it may take up to a year, even in some instances 30 months, to get crop damages that they destroy when they come in and do their line maintenance,” he said. “And they don’t want to pay you what it costs you.”
Oncor doesn’t care, Louder asserted
“We see yield drag for two and three years down the road, but they won’t pay for that,” he said. “…They do a lot of maintenance, and a lot of times in the compaction, if it’s wet when they come in, they don’t care about the weather, and they’ll pack that dirt, and it doesn’t produce like the rest of it. And you’re still spending the same amount of money, whether you’re harvesting something off of it or not, and they won’t pay for multiple years. They’ll only pay for that one year’s damages, and then they want to beat you up on what they’re going to pay.”
Louder says he can pretty much write off the right-of-way once they put the transmission line in, because it’s never going to be productive again like the rest of it.
It’s a high cost.
“On that property, it’s 200 feet,” he said. “It’s 5 percent of the farm. And you figure just the inputs, roughly $800 an acre. I mean, that’s $8,000. If you’re not producing anything off of it, that’s coming off the bottom line. So they’re taking your profit.”
None of Louder’s concerns are idle speculation. His estimate of the transmission lines’ impacts is rooted in experience. In his January testimony to the PUC, he described an earlier Oncor transmission-line upgrade in which poles and wires were replaced over three years. According to Louder, the project damaged irrigated farmland and caused substantial crop losses that he said was uncompensated.
“The area that was impacted did not germinate wheat in the latest growing season, and after three years, we still have no crop growing,” he wrote. “My experience with compaction on transmission lines is they never return to full production. This farm is also irrigated, and I could not irrigate during construction. I suffered substantial, uncompensated crop damages where Oncor’s work in a line upgrade was performed.”
That testimony identified other potential consequences, including interference with GPS-guided equipment and irrigation controls, restrictions on aerial crop spraying, changes to field operations, and possible fire hazards during cotton harvesting due to static buildup on machines.
A Charade of a Route Selection Process
Louder’s frustration extends beyond the physical damage to farmland to the regulatory process.
His first major encounter with the 765-kV expansion came when Oncor filed its Longshore-to-Drill Hole routing application in December 2025.
“They dropped that thing in our lap right there before the holidays,” he said. “And the timelines and stuff, the holidays were included in that. Well, anybody who is a professional, whether it’s a doctor, a lawyer, anybody like that, but Christmas holidays, they don’t work much, and especially from Christmas Eve to New Year’s Day. And they dropped that thing on us, and we had to meet all those timelines.”
Louder said it was tough to get all the material together to be represented and meet the PUC’s timeline.
“And in my opinion, they did that on purpose,” he said. “They just shoved that thing down our throat. And I learned a lot about the process and what a little fish we are in the sea …”
Despite those obstacles, Louder and other affected farmers mounted a formal challenge. Rather than simply opposing the project, his and the farmers’ co-op alliance recommended an alternative, which they argued would be shorter, less expensive, and less disruptive to agricultural communities, residences, and environmentally sensitive areas.
The PUC approved their proposed alternative in the end. Still, Louder said the process gave him no confidence in the system, and, in fact, he’s convinced the outcome had been predetermined and that Oncor never intended to select that route through his property.
“I’ll be real honest with you,” he said. “I think that first one that we fought, in my opinion, it was a dog and pony show. They knew the route they were going to take, and it didn’t matter what we did. That was the route they were going to take. It didn’t matter. And we were a litmus test, I think, for the rest of the state because out here you don’t have the same number of landowners, and this one was a little easier to test the waters because there were fewer people involved. Fewer people out here, fewer houses, fewer property owners, bigger tracts of land. And I feel like they started here because it was easier for them to test the waters.”
Louder’s belief about the predetermination of routes has been reinforced by information suggesting that Oncor may have purchased property near a proposed transmission corridor as early as 2021 or 2022, years before the formal routing application.
“They’ve got a tract of land that is very close to this transmission line,” he said. “It’s either 40 or 80 acres that we feel like will play a part in this transmission line.”
His concern is that utilities may spend years preparing major infrastructure projects while individual landowners are given comparatively little time to challenge plans that could permanently affect their property.
“And I don’t know that I’m going to fight this other stuff,” he said of the current proceedings. “I think they’ve kind of taken it down for now, but I feel like it’s going to come back. They had meetings and stuff, and then now we’re not hearing anything about it, and I can’t find anything on the website. I think they’ve paused it for now, but it’ll be back.”
The problem is complicated by the sheer number of his properties being affected
“It would take me three different attorneys to represent me because I have so many different properties on so many different lines and the same attorney can’t represent me on different routes,” he said.
Not that Louder is giving up.
“My hope is that the people in Austin will stop it,” he said. “That’s our only hope, that they’ll stop it because I don’t think this was the legislature’s intention. I’ll be real disappointed if our governor doesn’t do something.”
Louder says he thinks the legislature has been responsive: “I think the governor’s sitting on his hands, seeing what’s going to happen. He is the only person I think at this point that can stop it.”
Louder estimates that 30 to 50 people he knows personally in the region have been affected by the various transmission proposals, and that the total is likely higher when all routes are considered.
He also chafes because of the cost and purpose of the transmission expansion itself.
“The problem I have with all of this is ultimately I have north of a hundred electric meters, and we’re the ones that are going to pay for these lines,” he said.
The thing is, Louder says, the lines aren’t needed.
“They’re not going to serve any purpose,” he said. “They’re not going to help the problems in West Texas. A guy explained it to me like this. He said, ‘It’s like putting in a 400-mile extension cord. We’re not increasing electrical generation. The whole thing doesn’t make any sense other than Oncor and its subsidiaries are going to profit from it. And at our expense, that’s the frustrating part.”
He believes Texas should place greater emphasis on developing additional electrical generation, particularly by making better use of the natural gas resources already available in West Texas.
“We burn so much natural gas out of flare in West Texas,” he said. “There’s got to be a way for them to start utilizing the natural gas out here to start generating power. And I know everybody says, ‘Well, you got to have water. You got to have water.’ We have an ocean of water. It’s produced water. They need to figure out how to clean that stuff up so they can use it for electrical generation, generate our power out here, and utilize our resources. If you clean that water up and use it for electricity generation, at least you’re putting it back into the water cycle. With what we’re currently doing, disposing of it, once that water’s pumped down in the earth, we’re never going to get it back. But if these companies will figure out an economical way to clean that water up and use it for electrical generation out here, we solve our own problem.”
If he felt he would benefit from the transmission lines, Louder said he would probably have a different attitude.
“But I don’t for a second believe that it’s going to do anything to solve any problems in West Texas,” he said. “We pay the highest congestion rate in the state. Everything we do out here is more expensive than the rest of the state, but we got the cart before the horse out here is the problem, and these transmission lines are not going to solve it.”
For the future, Louder says stronger oversight of the PUC and of utilities exercising eminent domain is a must. He believes those entities possess too much power without sufficient accountability to the people whose land they affect.
“It’s going to take some radical change in Austin to change things with organizations like the PUC and some of those,” he said. “Those organizations to me have way too much power and not nearly enough oversight. LCRA [Lower Colorado River Authority], all those things have way too much power and not nearly enough oversight. And I don’t know how you structure that so that you get the oversight you need to keep them at bay.”
Oncor, too, has way too much power, Louder said.
“Once they have a right of way on your property, you don’t tell them what they’re going to do,” he said. “They tell you what you’re going to do. And they’re not the ones that are paying taxes on that or spent their whole life sacrificing to pay for land or anything else that somebody in 60 or 90 days can take away from you and you lose all control over it.”
