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