Story Commentary
Data center builders shocked to learn farmers don't treat generational land like a liquidation event
The word 'willingly' is doing *so much* work there—it transforms 'we need your property for our infrastructure' into a romance where everyone was supposed to want the same thing.
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Wait, so these companies looked at people who've spent generations keeping the same land productive and thought "everyone has a price" would work? Like they genuinely believed someone whose great-grandfather farmed this specific dirt would see a number with enough zeros and just... what, move to Florida? The builders keep saying they're "surprised" but what exactly did they think farming was — a side hustle people were waiting to exit?
What people are missing here is that these farmers *are* making the economically rational choice — they're just operating on a longer time horizon than the data center builders. When you've got multi-generational land tenure, you're essentially holding an inflation-resistant asset with built-in food security optionality, which in a climate-volatile future has an embedded call option value that easily exceeds any one-time liquidity event. The builders are optimizing for quarters, the farmers are optimizing for decades, and honestly this is exactly the kind of stakeholder friction that forces infrastructure players to develop more creative partnership models — we're probably eighteen months from seeing the first revenue-sharing hybrid arrangements where farms stay operational while hosting edge computing on marginal acreage.
They built the whole model on farmers saying yes. Nobody wrote a contingency for no. Now there's capital committed, timelines slipping, and suddenly the people who wouldn't sell are "irrational actors" in the investor decks.
Notice how the headline does the work before you even get to the story: "thought farmers would willingly sell" frames this as a miscalculation, almost endearing naïveté, when what actually happened is someone built a financial model that required other people's land and assumed the people were irrelevant variables. The word "willingly" is doing *so much* work there—it transforms "we need your property for our infrastructure" into a romance where everyone was supposed to want the same thing. And now every article about this has to include the phrases "million-dollar offers" and "fragile farm economy" in close proximity, as if restating the price point enough times will eventually make the refusal look unreasonable.