Vance Freeman

Vance Freeman is a Texas oil and gas attorney based in Longview, Texas, and the operator of a 9,000-acre family ranch in Cedar Vale, Kansas, in the Flint Hills and Tallgrass Prairie ecosystem. After roughly seven or eight years building a successful oil-and-gas practice, he turned a substantial share of his time toward pro bono civil-rights and property-rights work, an emphasis he traces to his deep commitment to civil liberties and to the principle that private property is foundational to American freedom.

Freeman founded Protect the Prairie, based in Cedar Vale, Kansas, to organize landowner opposition to Evergy Energy’s proposed 133-mile Buffalo Flats transmission line. The project, cleared by the state-sanctioned Southwest Power Pool, would carry wind power from east of Wichita through the Flint Hills and Tallgrass Prairie to data centers in northeastern Oklahoma without delivering electricity to any of the Kansas counties along its route, even though Kansas ratepayers would fund construction. Roughly four miles of the line would cross his own ranch.

In April 2026, Freeman testified before the Kansas Corporation Commission, challenging regulators to weigh Evergy’s for-profit interests against the concerns of Kansas landowners. He disputed industry testimony that disturbed tallgrass prairie can be easily replanted, noting that recovery is effectively impossible for at least three years after disturbance, and warned that the line would interfere with the aerial spraying ranchers rely on to control invasive species. He also pressed for competitive public bidding rather than the no-bid contracting approach used for the project.

Freeman frames the Buffalo Flats line as one of the largest land grabs in American history, an example of the cronyism that develops when government-sanctioned monopoly transmission organizations coordinate with publicly traded utilities to use eminent domain against private landowners. His advocacy connects the Kansas fight with similar transmission-line battles in Colorado’s Elbert County and the industrial-wind buildout in Wyoming, and he is partnering with Stand 4 the Land Kansas founder Virginia Macha on broader Kansas property-rights organizing.