$26 Million Rejected: Farmers Refuse Data Center Buyouts as Acreage Race Accelerates

A Kentucky landowner and her mother turned down more than $26 million for family farmland near Maysville — and the data center may be built anyway. Delsia Bare of Mason County said the developer's initial offer came unbidden. "Nobody consulted us or asked if we wanted a data center," she said in an interview.

Last month, Mason County's fiscal court approved an agreement with Meta, Facebook's parent company, to build a hyperscale data center near Maysville. Meta did not respond to a request for comment.

How high did the per-acre offers go?

The bidding climbed fast. "They originally offered $30,000 per acre," Bare said. She called that figure a low-ball, noting that in northern Virginia's "data center alley" developers "have been paying a whopping $200,000 per acre."

After the refusal, the developer returned with $48,000 per acre for Bare's property and $60,000 for her mother, Ida Huddleston. They initially accepted, because "they were threatening eminent domain," Bare said. They then changed their minds rather than watch land their families farmed for generations become "an endless warehouse of servers."

"You're not going to get a hamburger out of a data center," Bare said.

Her remaining worries are practical: spiking utility bills and water drawn from the local drinking supply to cool the servers. "They're not going to have the ability to produce the electricity they want," she said of the center.

How much farmland is actually at stake?

The national picture is hard to size, and that gap matters. Nobody appears to track acreage devoted to data centers. The United States has an estimated 5,000 of them, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation, with an average size of about 40 acres — though hyperscale facilities for AI computing can span thousands of acres.

For scale, US cropland covered 377 million acres in the 2022 Census of Agriculture. But experts say the conversion runs one way: once farmland becomes industrial land, it never returns to production. Bare wants no part of it. "No company should be able to take any percentage of prime agricultural land," she said. "We've already got a shortage of that."

She points to alternatives: brownfield sites or underground construction. Two data centers were approved on Indiana brownfields this year. Experts counter that prime agricultural land is often what industry finds ideal.

What happened to the holdouts in Virginia?

Elliot, a Catharpin, Virginia resident who asked to be identified by his middle name, refused what he called "ridiculous amounts of money, in the millions." He lives on a road with roughly 220 households. "204 or so signed on," he said.

His refusal put him at odds with neighbors, and his doubts were financial as much as philosophical. "It was never quite clear when we were going to get the money," he said. "Very few people here are independently wealthy, which is why there's an allure to huge sums of money."

Can communities stop these projects?

Often, no. Massachusetts and Texas have approved statewide restrictions, but resistance runs strongest locally, through nonprofits and hired lawyers. Mason County residents have sued twice to stop Meta's project. One suit was dismissed; the other moves to oral arguments soon.

"Our data center ordinance is not strong enough to protect the people who live around it," said Janet Garrison, a member of the local opposition group. "We shouldn't formalize any agreements until these issues are resolved." She criticized county officials for signing NDAs with the developer: "The fact that they did that tells you they have something to hide."

Who pays for the power?

The industry has promised to fund more of its own electricity, and legislators have introduced ratepayer-protection bills. Whether any of it works remains unproven. Hannah Wiseman, who teaches energy law at Penn State, wrote in a June blog post that "electricity rates have not been uniformly adjusted to require data center companies to pay for all the costs they impose on the grid." Any demand increase raises costs, she noted, and consumers are not always shielded.

What do counties get in return?

The largest centers create at most a few hundred permanent jobs plus several thousand temporary construction jobs, leaving property tax revenue as the most durable benefit. Some developers have dropped demands for tax abatement. "Data centers are no longer requiring local tax abatement," said Tom McCarthy, a commissioner for Union County, Ohio. "If you're a school and you can get more revenue and not add any more kids, that's a win."

In Mason County, the developer has pledged payments worth hundreds of millions of dollars, including millions in lieu of taxes for emergency services and a modern water treatment plant. "That could really help get us back on track as far as growth goes," said Tyler McHugh, executive director of the county's industrial development authority, who noted young people leave after high school seeking non-farming jobs.

The promises are pledges, not results, and Garrison's group insists several approvals and permits remain unresolved. Whether Mason County's safeguards hold before construction begins is the question the courts will now weigh.