Carter Collum spent the mornings shoulder to shoulder with competitors in the record halls of East Texas courthouses, chasing the owners of underground natural gas deposits. At night, he made house calls and offered payments and royalties for permission to drill.
Mr. Collum worked as a farmer, following the owners of oil and gas trapped in layers of rock thousands of feet below the Earth’s surface and getting their signatures, a job roughly as old as the American petroleum industry.
It began around 2006, a few years before the shale boom took off and prices for drilling rights in East Texas pushed up to over $ 15,000 an acre of about $ 250. add up, earned a six figure income.
“It was a bit like the Wild West,” said Mr. Collum, 39 years old. His predecessors in the field included former President George W. Bush and Aubrey McClendon, the late fracking pioneer who co-founded Chesapeake Energy Corp.
Nowadays the jobs are getting dry. Farmers, having weathered the heights of the boom, are facing weakened demand for fossil fuels and investor indifference to shale companies after years of poor returns. Instead of oil and gas fields, some farmers protect wind and solar fields, places where the sun shines brightest and the wind blows hardest.