Impact of Data Centers on Agriculture

The number of data centers that are going up across this country

is insane, and the

amount of farmland and water they're taking up

is insane as well.

I got a whiteboard to go through it. Let's get to it.

Okay, right now in the United States, we have over fifty-four hundred active

data

centers. That's more than every other country on

Earth combined, and that number is

about to explode. There's about fifteen hundred additional

data centers in some

stage of development right now that are either being planned, approved,

or under

construction. In the next few years, we will see over seven thousand data

centers

across every corner of this country.

And we're not talking about small server rooms either.

These are massive industrial complexes. Let's break down the acreage.

Now, I'm going off of twenty-twenty-four stats,

and that's because a lot of NDAs

are signed with these data centers that keep a lot of information from the

public.

But twenty-twenty-four stats give an average for one data center at two hundred

and

twenty-four acres. That's four hundred and fifty football field.

The largest campuses exceed over a thousand acres.

Now, here's where it gets serious for rural

America.

These facilities need flat land, cheap power, and proximity to

transmission lines, which describes farmland perfectly.

Farmland is their chief area that they target.

So with seven thousand data centers coming, multiply that by the average of

two hundred and twenty-four acres, we're looking at one point five

six eight million acres of farmland eaten up by

data centers by twenty-thirty at least.

The American Farm Bureau calls this conversion permanent.

Once that black soil gets paved over with concrete and steel, it almost never comes

back. And it's not just the footprint.

Rezoning nearby land for industrial use drives up land costs across

the region, pricing out the farmers who remain.

Now, let's talk about the water usage, especially out west here, where we're

dealing with mega water shortages from a snowless winter.

Now, the water usage is where this, these numbers almost become unbelievable.

But US data centers were already consuming an estimated four

hundred and

forty-nine million gallons per day.

That's of, as of twenty-twenty-one, and that's one hundred

and sixty-three billion

gallons a year. By twenty-thirty, that magical number where we're gonna own

nothing, they're anticipating an additional one

point four five billion

gallons of new water capacity needed per day.

That's equal to New York City's entire daily water supply.

So one single large data center can drink up up to five million gallons a day.

That's the same as a city of fifty thousand people. And here's the kicker.

Most of that water doesn't get returned. It evaporates through cooling towers.

It's gone. Now, the USA far surpasses any other country

for the number of data

centers, okay? We have an additional five thousand

compared to number

two, Germany. So we are going way, way beyond any other country on

the planet. Now, we're taking up huge amounts of farmland,

huge amounts of water.

The future implications of that are pretty obvious.

You take away farmland, you take away food for the people.

You take away water, you take away water from the people,

and you put it towards

AI, towards data centers. Why are we continuing to support and

build our own doomsday towards the future? 'Cause that's what it is.

All this plays to twenty-thirty agenda of moving us all into fifteen-minute cities

or cutting down the population because we won't have food to eat or we won't have

water to drink, and we're all giving it over to data

centers and big tech right

now.