David Schaefer wants to sell $50,000 kites to farmers to help them generate electricity by harnessing the power of the wind.

Schaefer, 54, is the CEO of eWind Solutions, a Beaverton, Oregon, company he founded in 2013 after quitting his job as director of mechanical engineering at Xerox.

“Imagine when you were a kid in a field flying the kite,” Schaefer says. “When the wind picks up you remember feeling that pull on the string. Well that pull is really energy. That’s what we’re doing. We’re harnessing that energy.”

Schaefer’s clean energy vision involves attaching lightweight kites to a spinning generator on the ground using an 800-foot rope. The kite, guided by software, twists in figure eights in the wind, pulling the rope and producing power. The tether is reeled in from the ground and the process repeats, much like a yo-yo.

One reason Schaefer is targeting farmers: Most farms have the approximately 40 acres of open space necessary to use the kites, which fly below the 500-foot limit set by Federal Aviation Administration guidelines.

“For all intents and purposes, the kite is a drone on a string tethered to the ground,” says Brennan Gantner, the company’s director of technical development. “We’re developing a drone, and we’re leashing it to the ground to generate electricity.”

Schaefer has high hopes for his kites. “This will replace the traditional wind tower and the massive concrete base… so, it’s much simpler,” he says. The kites, he says, are lighter and more efficient than traditional wind turbines and capture energy from stronger winds that blow at higher altitudes.

Schaefer and his co-founders invested about $350,000 into the project and have received various grants, including $700,000 from the US Department of Agriculture.

But turning Schaefer’s dream into reality will take years. eWind Solutions hopes to have a commercial product to sell by 2019. A lot of work remains to be done, including the development of a control system to launch the kite, guide it in the air and land it if the wind dies down.

Schaefer also faces competition from companies that started developing wind energy kites years before he started eWind Solutions. They include Makani, a California company Google bought in 2013. Its energy kites look more like planes. They are much larger and heavier than Schaefer’s kites and generate power in the air with rotors. Makani is testing models capable of generating enough power for utilities.

eWind Solutions’ kites will produce far less power and are aimed at farmers who spend between $5,000 and $17,000 a year on electricity. The company estimates the kites would pay for themselves in three to five years.

“Our kite could generate 45,000 kilowatt hours per year, which is equivalent to the annual energy usage of a small farm,” Schaefer says. “It’s also approximately equivalent to five American homes.”

And while Schaefer has a lot of work to do before reaching that goal, he’s clearly eager to get there.

“There are things we need to fix,” he says. “There’ll always be things that need to be fixed and improved upon. At some point you gotta stop and we gotta just sell it and say it’s good enough.”