Earlier in the morning, Carter Collum spent shoulder to shoulder with competitors in the record chambers of East Texas courthouses, searching for the owners of underground natural gas deposits. At night, he made home visits and offered payments and royalties for permission to drill.
Mr. Collum worked as a farmer and the owners of oil and gas trapped in rock layers tracked thousands of feet below the earth’s surface and obtained their signatures, a work as old as the U.S. petroleum industry.
It started around 2006, a few years before the shale boom began, pushing East Texas drilling prices to more than $ 15,000 per acre from about $ 250. Successful farmers, competing to beat in front of opponents, earned six incomes.
“It was similar to the Wild, Wild West,” Mr. Collum, 39, said. His predecessors in the field included former president George W. Bush and Aubrey McClendon, the late pioneer who co-founded Chesapeake Energy Corp.
These days, the work is going to dry out. Farmers, after the height of the boom, have a weakened demand for fossil fuels and indifference from investors to shale businesses after years of poor returns. Instead of oil and gas fields, some farmers secure wind and sun fields, places where the sun shines brightest and the wind blows hardest.