“Go West, Young Man” was a rallying cry by newspaper editor Horace Greeley for America to achieve its manifest destiny and build farms and communities in the nation’s then-vast unoccupied areas. Now, many of the farms spawned by that rallying cry are being gobbled up by developers of data centers. Data centers also require lots of electricity and water, so remaining farmlands can run dry and out of wattage.
The American Farm Bureau Federation is sounding the alarm that this trend is not only threatening the livelihood of farms, but also of the very supply of agricultural products upon which the nation depends/According to its website:
“Farmland is the foundation of agricultural production and a generational asset for farm families. Once converted to industrial use, it is rarely returned to production. In regions experiencing rapid development, the cumulative loss of prime farmland is a growing concern.”
Modern agriculture heavily relies on the digital economy—using precision ag, GPS, and cloud-based data to optimize crop yields. However, farmers are increasingly asking if the digital infrastructure meant to optimize their future is actively swallowing up the land and water needed to sustain it. The data center threat is moving some areas to enact zoning restrictions to keep the data centers out.
Texas, with 546 data centers in the works, and Virginia, with 706, are the most threatened, but as the graph shows, the data center drive is nationwide.
The rising friction between farmers and Big Tech comes down to a battle over the fundamental ingredients of both farming and computing: land, water, and power.
With the explosive growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI), data center developers are moving away from congested urban areas and aggressively buying up rural acreage. For agricultural communities, this influx creates immediate, existential threats to their livelihoods.
