On a bright day in early February, farmers Mark Shultz and Mike Leighow drove along the ruler-straight roads of Montour County in north-central Pennsylvania. From Shultz’s new Chevy Silverado, they gazed at the snow-covered farmland with a sense of nostalgia. These fields were at the heart of a proposal to rezone more than 800 agricultural acres to make way for a data center that residents had been fighting for months. Shultz and Leighow were just two out of hundreds of opponents.

Shultz slowed the truck as they passed the area where residents expected the data center would go, just a short distance from Talen Energy’s Washingtonville natural-gas power plant.

The company aimed to partner with Amazon Web Services for a data center buildout that would kick farmers off the land they leased from Talen and further reduce the county’s dwindling farmland. Even though the rezoning hadn’t yet been approved, workers dotted the open fields, surveying them for the anticipated development.

As tech companies and developers seek to power the artificial intelligence boom by building data centers anywhere they can, farmland is increasingly in high demand. The surge is sparking backlash in places like Montour County, where the loss of farmland, spiking property values, and a suite of environmental concerns threaten to destabilize agricultural communities.

Talen had already recently sold a nuclear-powered data center to Amazon in Berwick, about 20 miles from the proposed site in Montour County, and Amazon was expanding that complex to 960 megawatts—equivalent to the annual energy consumption of nearly one-fifth of all Pennsylvania households. This was the fate Shultz, Leighow, and their neighbors feared for their community.

But just a few days later, Montour county commissioners unanimously rejected the rezoning request. Sam Burleigh, a co-founder of Concerned Citizens of Montour County, a community action group formed to fight the proposal, called it a “David and Goliath” moment.

As data centers proliferate, the response in Montour County shows what it might take to stem the tide. Commissioner Rebecca Dressler cited “extraordinary public engagement” in voting against Talen’s request, which she said failed to demonstrate a clear public benefit.

“Public participation matters,” she said, “and it has mattered here.”

An Ideal Base for Data Centers

Pennsylvania is already home to more than 50 data centers of various sizes, and at least 50 more have been proposed. Ginny Marcille-Kerslake, a senior organizer with Food & Water Watch who supported the community’s resistance in Montour County, says the state has become a hotbed because of its abundant power, water, and land—the three essentials for data center development.

Pennsylvania is the country’s third-highest producer of energy, needed in enormous quantities to power data centers. It offers the largest network of waterways in the contiguous United States, necessary for cooling down the thousands of computers inside data centers. And it boasts millions of acres of relatively flat and open agricultural land that is ideal for development, if it can be secured.

The state’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, a presumed 2028 presidential candidate, has also welcomed the influx, promoting Amazon’s proposed $20 billion investment in the state by signing into law a tax break on purchases of key data center equipment.

For farmers in Montour County and beyond, the data-center boom threatens to shrink farmland and reduce the productivity of what remains.

Multiple sources, including Shultz and Leighow, say that if Talen had succeeded in its bid, it would have removed from agriculture additional neighboring land that it purchased contingent on getting its own land rezoned. Already, Montour County—at 132 square miles, the state’s geographically smallest county—has watched its farmland steadily disappear, losing 22 percent of its land and 28 percent of its farms between 2017 and 2022 alone. The rezoning would have exacerbated that trend.

Andy Bater, a Pennsylvania Farm Bureau board member, says the disappearance of farmland can lead to “a vicious cycle” of increased prices that push out current farmers and keep away new entrants. “That’s the dilemma that I think about all the time,” he says.

What’s more, nearby farmers would be forced to reckon with operating alongside a data center. Shultz has already gotten a taste of the risks, due to transmission lines that run to and from the Talen plant in Washingtonville, cleaving his 500 acres of corn, soy, and hay. The energy company tramples his crops to access the lines, and he worries about the effects of stray voltage. Talen has been “an unfriendly neighbor” for years, he says; residents still lament the destruction of Strawberry Ridge, a farming village that was razed to make way for the power plant decades ago.

Data centers have prompted a litany of community environmental complaints, including for their massive draw on local water supplies—a particular concern in Montour County, where the vast majority of residents and farms rely on wells.

“If we can’t get water, we can’t survive,” says Leighow, who grows 105 acres of corn and soy in Montour County on land first purchased by his grandfather in 1901.