After farming thousands of acres with his family for more than a century, Buerger was forced to give up 600 acres of rented farmland when his landlord suddenly sold the property to a developer clearing the site for the tech giant. “‘You’ve got to be done in 60 days, and you’re out. Along with his family’s 6,000 acres, where they grow cotton, wheat and milo, the rented fields gave the family more flexibility for crop rotations and livestock management.
“When I explained I had a crop on it, they said ‘You can finish it, but that’s it,'” Buerger said. “It makes me feel a little threatened just from losing land to data centers,” Buerger said. “We can’t compete with that.”
Standing near the Haskell County border in West Texas, fourth-generation farmer Cheyenne Buerger can see industrial cranes building a huge Google facility just over four miles to the northeast. Until recently, part of that same horizon was farmland he worked himself. The eviction gave the local farmer very little time to harvest his remaining crops and leave the land. Losing the land near Haskell has taken away a large part of Buerger’s local farming operation.
Data from the Pew Research Center shows that about 67 per cent of data centres in the United States are located in rural areas. An analysis by The Texas Tribune found 335 operating data centres across Texas, with at least 248 more either planned or under construction.
The loss of farmland to technology projects is becoming more common across Texas, according to an investigation by The Texas Tribune. As major technology companies expand artificial intelligence and cloud computing, developers are moving into rural counties looking for large, flat and relatively cheap areas of land. In Texas, low taxes and large amounts of available land have long attracted major industries, but the current growth of data centres has reached new levels. The fast conversion of farmland into large server campuses is causing concern among farmers who are increasingly competing with wealthy technology companies for land and other important resources, including groundwater and electricity.
The industry produces more than $963 billion in total economic activity and generates nearly $15 billion in annual exports, according to state production figures cited in the report. Three major developments, Project Matador in the Panhandle, Project Pacifico in Pecos County and Project Meta in El Paso, are expected to cover at least 16,000 acres combined. That is roughly equal to 12,000 American football fields.
“They’re building them on our most valuable, most fertile farmland,” said Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller. The expansion comes at a difficult time for Texas agriculture. State officials have also criticised the choice of farmland for some of these projects. Speaking at a public forum on rural industrial development organised by The Texas Tribune in Granbury, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller warned that turning fertile soil into technology sites could permanently reduce the state’s ability to produce food. “Once our farmland is gone and paved over, we’ll never farm it again. The amount of land needed for some of these projects is enormous.