Farmers Fight Massive Data Centers in Rural Areas
Mervin Raudabuagh could have been a millionaire. Developers offered him $60,000 for each acre of his 261-acre Cumberland County, Pennsylvania farm— a total of $15.7 million. But he turned them down and instead sold the development rights to the Lancaster Farmland Trust.
“It is my life. I was not interested in destroying my farms,” Raudabuagh told reporters. If he had signed the deal, his farm’s natural beauty and agricultural potential would indeed have been destroyed—by a huge AI data center development project.
Raudabuagh is just one of countless farmers across the country who are faced with the wrenching decision of whether to sell their land for four or five times its value or fight to keep it in agricultural production. At a time when farmers are struggling financially with rising input costs and unstable agricultural markets, the prospect of selling out is tempting. But the thought of what the data center developers are going to do with their land is so troubling that many farmers are turning down multimillion-dollar offers.
Data centers are as old as the internet, but the ones that AI giants like Meta, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are building now are on an unprecedentedly huge scale. These complexes of windowless buildings can sprawl for hundreds or even a thousand acres. Inside are thousands of computer servers, which can draw as much electricity as 100,000 homes per complex. Cooling those computers requires as much water as 50,000 homes. Farmers on adjacent land worry that this could lower aquifers enough to impact their own wells for irrigation or livestock.
In terms of energy and water usage, building a data center is like building a medium-sized city—with a higher density of energy and water use than a typical residential neighborhood of single-family homes. As far as environmental impact is concerned, these data centers are even worse than the long-decried practice of building housing developments on farmland.
And for what? Housing developments give people a place to live. Farmland solar development produces electricity. But these data centers will mainly be used to power such dubious AI applications as generating videos for mindless entertainment, which requires the amount of electricity it takes to run a microwave for an hour to create one five-second clip. The only reliable way to quickly provide that much steady electricity is with fossil fuels, which will reverse most of the decrease in carbon emissions we’ve made in the past twenty years.
The good news for eco-farmers is that even conventional farm lobbying groups—like the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation—are concerned about the impact of data center development on American farmland. In Kentucky, farmers are joining together to fight data center development. Farmers and rural Republicans are pushing back against President Trump’s declaration that massive AI expansion is essential for national security.
We may disagree about specific farming practices, but we can all agree that turning farmland into massive industrial developments is neither sustainable nor regenerative.
