My farm in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, has been in our family for nearly two centuries. My great-great-grandparents worked it with their hands. My grandparents ran it as a dairy. My mother lives on it still. I bought my own piece of that land — a patch of earth I’ve been planning to retire to, where I had hoped to plant apple trees, cherry trees, and pumpkins beside her.
Now, two developers want to build a 1.2-gigawatt data center campus on 450 acres adjacent to our farm, and everything my family has worked for is under threat.
This is not a story about nostalgia. It is a story about property rights, about the rule of law, and about what happens when one of the most powerful industries in the world decides that agricultural land — zoned explicitly for farming, some of it under formal state preservation — is more valuable to them than it is to the families who have spent generations tending it.
MAJORITY OF AMERICANS OPPOSE AI DATA CENTERS BEING BUILT IN THEIR AREAS
It is also, for my family, the second time we have watched the government’s machinery turn against us. My grandparents lost their dairy herd in the 1950s, after government inspectors believed the cows had tuberculosis and destroyed them. When the test results came back negative, my grandparents were told it was too bad. They could not afford to replace the herd. They went to work in local factories instead, and the dairy operation never returned. The land stayed in the family. Today, a friend farms it. My mother still lives on it. And what they took from my grandfather 70 years ago, a trillion-dollar industry now wants to take from his grandson.
To build the data center, the township will have to rezone working agricultural land for industrial use. My mother did not agree to sell. The township has not been required to hold a supermajority vote or a binding public hearing on the rezoning itself. The developers held an optional town hall — the formal process that will actually rezone the land does not require one. This is happening not because the land is uniquely suited for data centers, but because it is cheap, because the power grid runs through it, and because rural counties have fewer lawyers than city planning boards do.
There is a larger question embedded in our family’s fight. In the year America celebrates 250 years of constitutional government, we are watching agricultural land — preserved by law, zoned by regulation, and worked by families for generations — being rezoned for industrial use without the transparency or consent that those same regulations promise. If property rights do not protect a Pennsylvania farm that has been in continuous use since before the Civil War, what property rights actually exist anymore?
My fourth great-grandfather, Jacob Miller, is buried in a cemetery on the scenic byway where our farm sits. His headstone reads: Pvt 4 Batt 1st Co Northampton Flying Camp, Revolutionary War. In 1776, he served in the militia battalions that Gen. George Washington personally requested from Pennsylvania to defend the middle colonies. The land my family farms sits less than 50 miles from Washington’s Crossing on the Delaware River. The road is a designated scenic byway. The colonial cemeteries, stone homes, and 1803 schoolhouse within walking distance of our fields make this one of the most intact Revolutionary-era landscapes in the Mid-Atlantic.
I raise this history not out of nostalgia. I raise it because the men who are buried there fought for a principle: that property rights — the right to keep what you own, and to decide what happens to it — were foundational to freedom itself. That principle was radical in 1776. It should not be radical in 2026.
The data have to live somewhere. There are thousands of underutilized industrial parks across America with the power and water infrastructure data centers require already in place. Lower Mount Bethel Township is not one of them. It is being targeted because it is vulnerable. And because the developers know that if a rezoning can happen here, it can happen anywhere a company has enough lawyers and enough money.
The costs of getting this wrong are concrete. At 1.2 gigawatts, this single data center campus will consume as much electricity as nearly a million American homes — roughly the residential load of a city the size of Pittsburgh. On a grid built for farms, that demand strains infrastructure and raises rates for every household and small business in the region. The developers have committed to drawing cooling water from the Delaware River through the adjacent Martins Creek Power Plant rather than from local groundwater — an arrangement that depends entirely on the long-term reliability of a single corporate commitment. Even at the developer’s stated 50 million gallons annually, the water permits required for this facility will tie up regional capacity for decades. The bald eagles nesting on the proposed site, still protected under federal law, were there before any of us were.
My family is not alone. More than 42,000 people have now signed a Change.org petition calling on Congress and state legislatures to restrict data center construction to industrially zoned land. They are signing because what is happening in Northampton County is happening in Virginia, Iowa, Texas, and every state where a farming community has discovered that its zoning is suddenly negotiable. The movement is not coastal, and it is not partisan. It is the response of a country that still believes the rules should mean something.
The conservative case for stopping this is not an environmental case or a romantic one. It is a rule-of-law case. Agricultural zoning exists. Farmland preservation laws exist. Federal eagle protection exists. These are not new regulations. They are existing laws that are being ignored for a single corporate bidder. The question is whether we still have a legal system in which the rules apply to everyone, or whether we have a system where the biggest corporation gets exemptions.
I am not opposed to technological progress. I have benefited from it. What I am opposed to is the assumption that progress gives one industry the right to displace another — that a company’s balance sheet outweighs 200 years of a family’s history, or the food security and water supply of an entire region. That is not progress. That is substitution of one set of interests for another, dressed up in the language of inevitability.
RESISTANCE TO DATA CENTERS GROWS NATIONWIDE
As America approaches 250 years of constitutional government, this is the question that matters. We can celebrate the founding, or we can actually defend the principles that the founding enshrined. We cannot do both if property rights are no longer binding on government when a trillion-dollar industry decides they are inconvenient.
My mother wants to finish her years on the land her family has worked since the 1860s. I want to come home and walk the fields my great-great-grandparents walked, and plant the fruit trees I’ve been planning for years. That should not require heroism. It should require only that the law mean what it says — and that the government, this time, get it right.
Bruce Horne is a multigenerational Pennsylvania farmer and a descendant of Pvt. Jacob Miller, Northampton Flying Camp, Revolutionary War. He is the author of a Change.org petition, signed by more than 42,000 people, urging that data centers be sited on industrially zoned land.