An 82-year-old Kentucky farmer turned down $26 million rather than let a Fortune 100 AI company pave over her family’s land.
Now the same companies she rejected are targeting Pennsylvania – and the governor just handed them a fast lane.
What Big Tech is doing to America’s food supply, and what one state is letting them get away with, is worse than anything the media is telling you.
Josh Shapiro Is Fast Tracking Hyperscale Data Centers While Pennsylvania Farmland Disappears
In February, Democrat Governor Josh Shapiro stood before the Pennsylvania legislature and declared the state was “all in on AI” – having already celebrated Amazon’s $20 billion data center investment like a man running for president in 2028.
Then, facing a backlash from rural communities watching their farmland get targeted by developers offering 10 times market value, he pivoted.
He called it GRID – the Governor’s Responsible Infrastructure Development initiative.
The pitch sounded reasonable: companies that follow certain standards get “speed and certainty in permitting and available tax credits” from the state.
The incentive Shapiro built wasn’t to protect farmland – it was to reward developers who promise to behave while they convert it.
Pennsylvania already has no comprehensive state regulations governing data center development.
GRID creates a fast lane for companies that agree to Shapiro’s checklist – while the farmland stays unprotected and rural communities scramble to pass local ordinances before the next developer arrives.
In Montour County, a fracked-gas energy company was covertly buying up 800 acres of pristine farmland to build a massive data center for Amazon Web Services before residents even knew what was happening.
In Lower Mount Bethel Township, residents showed up to public hearings about a proposed 1.2-gigawatt project – a facility that would permanently convert hundreds of acres of farmland into an industrial complex – because showing up was the only tool they had left.
AI Data Centers Are Consuming Americas Farmland and Threatening the Food Supply
The American Farm Bureau Federation put the stakes plainly: farmland conversion is generally permanent.
Once a developer paves over prime agricultural soil, it doesn’t come back.
The United States is already losing 2,000 acres of farmland every single day to non-agricultural uses – 75 million acres gone between 1997 and 2022, according to USDA data.
Data center land transactions surged 144% since 2022 alone.
In Oregon’s Columbia River Basin, developers are expected to target 3,000 additional acres of prime farmland over the next decade.
In Indiana, farmers who refuse to sell are still getting punished – inflated land offers from data center developers are driving up property taxes, putting expansion out of reach for anyone who actually wants to grow food.
In Pennsylvania, an 86-year-old farmer near Harrisburg named Mervin Raudabaugh turned down $15.7 million – about $60,000 per acre – for his 261-acre farm and instead sold the development rights to the Lancaster Farmland Trust to ensure the land stays farmland forever.
“The American farm family is definitely in trouble,” Raudabaugh said.
State Rep. Marla Brown introduced a bill that would ban data centers from prime farmland outright.
State Sen. Katie Muth proposed a three-year statewide moratorium on hyperscale data center construction – giving regulators and communities time to put real protections in place before more land disappears permanently.
Franklin County commissioners adopted their own ordinance in May after months of public hearings.
But municipalities across Pennsylvania cannot ban data centers outright or impose moratoriums under state law.
The legal authority rests with the state – with Shapiro – and what Shapiro built was a permitting accelerator, not a firewall.
Nobody in the media is asking the obvious question: the Rust Belt has hundreds of thousands of acres of abandoned industrial land sitting empty – shuttered steel mills, dead factories, brownfield sites in towns that would welcome the jobs and tax revenue a data center brings.
Why isn’t Big Tech building there?
Because farmland is flat, cleared, and cheap to develop – sitting near the power infrastructure these facilities need – and because governors like Shapiro hand out tax credits to take it.
Paving over a brownfield in Pittsburgh costs more than paving over a family farm in Northampton County, so the family farm loses.
Back in Mason County, Kentucky, Ida Huddleston told the developers exactly what she thought of their promises.
“They call us old stupid farmers,” she said. “We know whenever our food is disappearing, our lands are disappearing, and we don’t have any water.”
She called their pitch a scam.
She’s right – and the math behind what these companies are doing should alarm every American who eats.
The country lost 75 million acres of farmland in 25 years while the population kept growing and grocery prices kept climbing.
Big Tech doesn’t need your farmland to build their data centers – they need it to be cheap, and they need governors who will look the other way.
Josh Shapiro is that governor.
Sources:
- American Farm Bureau Federation, “Balancing Data Center Growth with American Agriculture,” AFBF Market Intel, April 23, 2026.
- The Center Square, “Farmland prime for data centers, but at what cost?” The Center Square, May 21, 2026.
- Franklin County Free Press, “Data Center Development Raises Farmland Concerns in Pennsylvania,” Franklin County Free Press, May 22, 2026.
- NewsNation, “Maysville, Kentucky, family rejects AI company’s $26 million offer for farmland,” NewsNation, March 26, 2026.
- Yahoo Finance/Moneywise, “Kentucky farm family rejects $26M from mystery data center giant,” March 22, 2026.
- Franklin County, PA, “Data Center Ordinance,” FranklinCountyPA.gov, May 20, 2026.
