This comment got me wondering whether loss of farmland in the US is a serious issue.

It looks like there's about 800 million acres of farmland in the US and we're losing about 2 million acres per year to the land being repurposed. Despite that, crop production has more than tripled in the past 70 years due to technological advances.

That said, economic effects, loss of farmland, and climate change have contributed to slower growth and higher variability of crop yields recently.

In the past decade there's been a modest 0.8% annual increase in crop production despite losing about 2 million acres per year.

Yeah, it's not a significant amount of land. But it does seem like these companies prefer to take quality farmland instead of unused land. There's something similar happening near my town, where a company wants to put a big solar array on some prime farmland, and the locals are asking why that spot and not getting an answer. It might save a small amount on development, as farmland is fairly flat and has no trees to remove, but that's miniscule in the overall budget for these things, and rough ground would be much cheaper to buy. But the corporation behind it and the government entities involved are digging in their heels and insisting on using farmland, without any explanation why.

So it does seem like some of the people making these decisions just like the idea of taking farmland out of production for some reason. Maybe they just don't like farmers or modern farming methods. If that's their motive, they may not realize how tiny an effect they're having on the total, because most non-farmers don't really understand how much land is out there.

It's like the people who say Bill Gates is trying to control the food supply because he owns something like 270,000 acres of farmland. Even that just isn't that much, not enough for him to control anything larger than the horseradish market.

What unused land? Where?

In my part of Ohio, everything big enough for a meaningful solar farm is "prime" farmland or coveted and necessary forest or wetlands -- unless it's already used for business, or housing, or infrastructure to support civilization.

Perhaps my perspective is simply very limited, but: In my estimation, there is no unused land to use.

Even the big pile of dirt I drive by twice a day: It does stuff. It gets bigger and smaller as some pay to get rid of extra dirt from their project, and others pay to buy some of that dirt for a different project. Someone somewhere manages that pile of dirt.

The problem is not the amount of land but if that land is economically viable. Farm already has low margins.so, if you grab a good location to build a data center and push the farm land even further away from population centers, then you are pretty much killing family farms.

There are virtually no family farms left in the US. Especially central Indiana corn farmers. 1200 acres wouldn’t be a financially viable corn farm if it were family farmed.

I think this is really close. My hunch is that agricultural land is just simply cheaper to acquire and convert, as compared to industrial land which may or may not have all kinds of remediation or razing that needs to happen to it first.

One of the major problems facing American agriculture is that there are fewer and fewer farmers/farming families.

Farming is extremely money and labor intensive and there’s a lot of upfront investment with a lot of long-tail return, and it’s not “sexy” the way (for example) AI is, so there’s not a bottomless pit of cash to shovel into the furnace for a quick buck turnaround.

Independent farmers tend to seriously rely on good weather and a lot of advantageous tax treatment.

Of course massive agri-business would very much love to continue to fill more and more of the void left by the shrinking independent farming population. That has its own problems.

It will swing back one day. Maybe in a few generations.

Has there ever been a swing back to small, independent producers of anything after an industry has consolidated?

You're thinking too short-term if you're asking that question.

Beer brewing.

Also whether the farmland requires irrigation. In Ohio, there’s not much irrigation. In Indiana, you see it a lot more. In Idaho, it’s basically a hard requirement

> "Can't they find brownfield sites instead of fields"

You mean precisely like xAI did in Memphis? Build on the site of an abandoned factory—a historically disadvantaged, low-income industrial zone?

I couldn't imagine anyone having anything negative to say about that.

This seems pretty bad faith.

The problem with what xAI is doing in Memphis is they were originally running "temporary" generators for over a year (effectively permanently ...) without meeting emission requirements a permanent generator would need to.

Sure, it's not xAI's fault the local power grid isn't suitable for their datacenter but the problem here is that xAI is effectively not following the law.

As far as "industrial" neighbors go, a datacenter is a pretty good one to have vs an abandoned husk vs an active polluter/nuisance, at least if that datacenter isn't run by a selfish psychopath that tacked on a bunch of gas burning generators to power the thing.

The county it is located in is about 290,000 acres.

Indiana is about 23 million acres.

I don't know about Indiana, but in Texas companies buy farmland because it's often available near population centers and infrastructure. And the land is available because the existing owners do just enough farming/ranching to qualify for the lower tax category.

Why? Hold outs, zoning, greedy politicians and more. I drove through a blighted neighborhood. There were 60-70% unkempt houses and maybe 10-15% in great shape. Some won't want to move for their own reasons and they'll refuse to sell. Some will just be trying to get more money. Others will be sincere. It's very hard to unsubdivide land.

And then there are the zoning and city regulations which naturally resist. You would think they would welcome a new taxpayer, but they're really in love with the regulations that someone wrote decades ago. The odds of getting them to bend is anyone's guess, but in most cases a bribe or ten is going to be required.

it's probably not actually rich soil, maybe a writer's flourish - post harvest fields are pretty much barren of nutrients and life

This particular site is being built basically in the parking lot/backyard of a steel mill, so it sort of is brownfield. I have a hunch that “empty cornfield” is just the author using some artistic freedom instead of saying “an empty field in the Midwest”.

It was definitely farm fields growing crops, you can look in Google Earth and see for yourself.

Edit: Anywhere in the Midwest where there is a large expanse of flat ground will almost always be growing crops or have a town built on it. Undeveloped land is almost all hilly and forested or floodplain, nowhere where you could put a data center.