Ex-farm bureau chief invites AI data center developers to buy his land —argues blocked $6.3B project will just move to willing neighbors, defies 500-jurisdiction moratorium wave and 70% public opposition
Blake Hurst, a farmer in Atchison County, Missouri, who led the Missouri Farm Bureau from 2010 to 2020, invited data center developers to bid on his land in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, writing, “Developers, make me an offer.” His farm sits roughly 40 miles from the proposed White Cloud Acres project in neighboring Nodaway County, a data center campus that local reporting has valued at $6.3 billion and that county commissioners halted on July 21 with a moratorium of up to six months. Hurst’s pitch runs against national polling that now puts opposition to nearby data centers at 63% to 70%, and against a wave of restrictions that passed 500 jurisdictions nationwide this month.
Nodaway County’s commissioners passed their moratorium ordinance while they negotiate a development agreement with Scale Microgrids, the developer behind White Cloud Acres. A petition against the project gathered more than 7,000 signatures in roughly two months, according to the Northwest Missourian, and Maryville’s mayor has said he opposes it.
Hurst’s counterargument focuses on the fact that Nodaway County’s population fell from 23,402 in the 2010 census to a 2025 estimate of roughly 20,300, a decline of about 13%, and its largest employer is a university with falling enrollment. He cites project projections of 130 on-site jobs and more than $1 billion in tax revenue over the facility’s 35-year life, and contends that a blocked project doesn’t disappear; it gets built somewhere else while the tax base stays gone.
Emerson College polling found opposition to nearby data centers jumped from 42% in December 2025 to 63% in July, while a March Gallup survey put it at 70%, with 48% strongly opposed. New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the country’s first statewide moratorium on July 14, pausing permits for projects of 50 megawatts or more, and Maine’s legislature passed its own before Governor Janet Mills vetoed it.
The refusals Hurst references have become something of a genre of their own. A Kentucky family turned down $26 million for roughly 900 acres in Mason County, about 10 times the local going rate of $6,000 per acre, while a neighboring cattle farmer rejected offers of $35,000 per acre, more than four times market value.
The Mason County developer redrew its site plan around willing sellers and kept moving, which supports Hurst’s relocation argument. Holdouts have raised the price of farmland near transmission lines without stopping a single hyperscale campus outright, and Hurst, who ran the lobby representing farmers like them for a decade, is publicly volunteering to sell.
