“There is no price on earth enough for what they are getting ready to do,” said Delsia Bare, the Kentucky farmer who turned down 26 million dollars offered by the mystery fortune 100 company who wanted to build an AI data center on 1200 acres of her family’s land. She added, “There’s no replacing what they’re getting ready to destroy.”
I grew up on an eighty-acre family farm in Lancaster County. Where a country road dips down and crests again, a dairy farm comes into view. There, on an Easter Sunday morning fifty years ago, a dairy farmer in his thirties stood under pink cherry blossoms holding his youngest baby. She was wearing a hand-crocheted white sweater and he wore a plain Mennonite suit. That baby was me.
I was ten when Kentucky farmer and poet Wendell Berry gave his In Defense of the Family Farm speech:
With industrialization has come a general depreciation of work. As the price of work has gone up, the value of it has gone down, until it is now so depressed that people simply do not want to do it anymore…One works, not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit—a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation. This is explained, of course, by the dullness of the work, by the loss of responsibility for, or credit for, or knowledge of the thing made.”
Last week when I passed my childhood home on my way to a family event, the greening fields blinked in the sun, as if to say, “We’re okay, for now.” An Amish family lives there now.
I pulled into the familiar parking of my childhood church, and crossed the road to the event. My niece’s bridal shower was taking place inside the rehabbed schoolhouse (the very schoolhouse where my parents first met in the eight grade) now rented by the church for events. After the one-room school closed, it became home to Mary Eby, a woman from the church. When Mary moved to the retirement home across from Park City Center, the building became multi-purpose meeting space, used the building for quilting circles, Sunday school classes, and youth group. (It happens to be where, in the sixth grade, I became self-conscious when a peer told me that whenever I talked it went right over her head and in the 7th grade an eager youth pastor thought it relevant to revive the tired theory of backmasking and lead us into the weeds by sampling backwards recordings of KISS and Led Zeppelin).
However, this day was my niece’s bridal shower, and I was fifty, grey-haired, and wearing a sweater that belonged to my grandma. It was among the things our family took home from the nursing home where she died, the same one, across from Park City Mall. Inside the neck is a tag that reads, “Nora Miller.”
Nora Miller and Mary Eby were old friends. Eby used to be spelled Abi, before it was Americanized. In the 1700s our ancestors probably came over on the same German ships through the Port of Philadelphia. Having endured discrimination and persecution for their religious practices as Anabaptist, our ancestors made their way to Lancaster County as beneficiaries of William Penn’s land grants.
First came the settlers. Because the Europeans had firearms, the Susquehannock needed more beaver pelts to trade for guns. Because the Susquehannock expanded their hunting and trapping radius, they got into conflict over resources with the Lenni-Lenape and the Iroquois Nation. According to a publication in the Gardner Library Historical Society by one Carsten Brodbeck, “The Beaver Wars would eventually result in the collapse of the Susquehannock Nation, both in terms of population and political power.”
There’s no replacing what we’ve already destroyed.
For hundred of years before William Penn offered my ancestors farmland in Lancaster County, the forests and creeks of Lancaster County were home to the Susquehannock, an Iroquoian-speaking group (politically independent of the powerful Iroquois Confederacy to the north). By the eighteenth century, the Susquehannock were settled in a dozen palisaded villages, with a population numbering about three to four thousand people.
Historians tell us that William Penn “allowed” the Susquehannock to settle along the banks of the Susquehanna River. “Displaced native Americans would settle in the Susquehanna Valley at places like Conoy Indian Town (in Lancaster County), providing a population barrier between the English Colonies and the Iroquois Confederacy.
But we also know that in 1763, dozens of white settlers from the Pennsylvania frontier came to the Indian Town in Lancaster County to murder the Conestoga, the last remnant of the Susquehannock. “Upon their first attack, they killed six Conestogas. The fourteen survivors fled to the Lancaster County jail, but the Paxton vigilantes pursued them once again, broke into the jail, and ruthlessly slaughtered the fourteen surviving Conestogas, women and children included.”
The extermination carried out by the Paxton murderers ended hundreds of years of Susquehannock political organization in the Susquehanna Valley.
Then came the developers. Farmland transformed into shopping centers and restaurants. In 1971, Park City Center sprang up on farmland along Harrisburg Pike and Route 30, and provided the end-of-life view of many retired Mennonite farmers living out their final days at the Mennonite Nursing Home across the road. Just up the road was the childhood home and farm where my Dad’s father, Andrew Miller Sr., grew up. In the nineties, the marshlands along Fruitville Pike became Red Rose Commons, and decades later came the Shoppes at Belmont. “Coming Soon” signs boast multi-unit developments all along the Pike, heralding new construction on former farmland. My friend Becky’s childhood home and farm is now part of Lititz Airport. Where we made spaghetti in her kitchen and went night swimming in her pond, airplanes now taxi.
Now, farmers are being offered fortunes by data tech companies so that instead of corn, hay, barley, sorghum, and soybeans, their land can run collosal data centers to produce massive data sets. Research published by the Brookings Institute finds that 70% of jobs are in someway exposed to AI, meaning that workers may eventually find themselves redundant. We know that AI data centers will consume 9% of US electricity by 2030. What we may not know is that the most resource-intensive part of AI is the training phase, which can account for up to half of an AI system’s total resource use.
I don’t know if the other Kentucky farmers will stand their ground. I admire Delsia Bare, who understands the value of meaningful work, of stewardship of the land, and preserving what matters over the myopic values of convenience, efficiency, and liquid cash.
Here is Wendell Berry again:
“At the simplest, most practical level, it would be difficult for most of us to give enough in donations to good causes to compensate for, much less remedy, the damage done by the money that is taken from us and used destructively by various agencies of the government and by the corporations that hold us in captive dependence on their products. Most important, even if we could give enough to overbalance the official and corporate misuse of our money, we would still not solve the problem: the willingness to be represented by money involves a submission to the modern divisions of character and community.”
Step closer. 