Meet Blake Hurst, the Missouri farmer who is welcoming data centers

TARKIO, Mo. (KQTV) -- A Missouri farmer who recently published an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal is pushing back against objections regarding data center development in rural communities, arguing that these facilities represent economic value.

Blake Hurst is a farmer from Tarkio who has been working land for nearly 50 years, a greenhouse grower, and past president with the Missouri Farm Bureau.

But his recently published piece in the Wall Street Journal has drawn some criticism from neighbors.

He began by addressing the most common complaints about data centers, including their water usage, electricity consumption, and the loss of farmland.

On the issue of water, Hurst dismissed concerns, pointing to abundant rainfall in Northwest Missouri, which averages between 36 and 50 inches per year.

"Are we running out of water? No, we are not," he stated.

He similarly brushed aside worries about electricity, arguing that it is not a fixed resource.

"We know how to generate it. We know how to build power plants," he said, adding that electricity rates in areas with high concentrations of data centers have not risen as fast as they have elsewhere.

On the subject of farmland loss, Hurst said Missouri has more farmland than it needs.

He pointed to the financial struggles of modern farmers, including himself, who are barely breaking even on crops like corn, soybeans, and wheat.

"If you're making a good profit growing crops, you can disagree with me," he said, "but I think most farmers would have to agree, at the very least, that they need higher prices in order to survive."

For Hurst, the real crisis facing rural Missouri is not data centers but the slow depopulation that has lessened communities for decades.

He described rural regions that are losing schools, hospitals, roads, and local businesses, making it increasingly difficult to sustain the quality of life residents expect.

"We can't sustain our schools, our hospital, our roads, all the infrastructure that makes the kind of life we all expect," he said. "We can't sustain it if we continue to have a decline in the economy, in the population."

He argued that data centers offer a rare opportunity to reverse that trend by bringing jobs, tax revenue, and economic activity to those sparse areas.

He noted that the proposed White Cloud Acres data center in Nodaway County would employ several hundred people, spend hundreds of millions of dollars, and generate significant property tax revenue.

In his opinion piece, he elaborated on the scale of the opportunity, writing that the Nodaway County project would bring more than a billion dollars in tax revenue over its 35-year lifespan, according to projections.

Yet, he says, many residents respond with opposition. "People are saying, no, no, no, I don't want it. I don't want it," he stated.

Blake also highlighted what he sees as a deep irony in the opposition.

He pointed out that farmers, who are among the earliest adopters of new technology, are often the loudest voices against data centers.

"They have embraced autonomous tractors, AI-driven machinery, and massive, noisy equipment that runs for days during harvest," he said. "One of the complaints about data centers is, gosh, they make a lot of noise. But I think farmers need to be very, very careful when we complain about noise, because all of us drive trucks and tractors up the road. Any business has effects on its neighbors, and these are businesses just like the ones we run."

He also noted that rural communities have consistently voted for protectionist trade policies aimed at bringing manufacturing back to the United States, but when a modern factory in the form of a data center actually wants to build locally, those same communities say no.

"That's what people voted for," he said, referring to the widespread support for tariffs and trade restrictions. "And now somebody wants to build a factory here, a factory for data. And we're saying, no, no, we can't have it."

Hurst also stated that if he owned big pieces of farmland, he would not hesitate to sell it to data center corporations.

"Yes, I would sell it to them if the price was right," he said, explaining that he would use the money to buy other farmland a few miles down the road.

He acknowledged the emotional attachment many farmers feel to family land, which has been passed down through generations, but he insisted that farming is also a business.

"We don't have to farm in a certain spot in the world," he said. "We can move down the road three or four or ten miles."

He expressed respect for those who choose to hold onto their family farms, and in his piece he even praised the Kentucky farmers who turned down multi-million dollar offers, but he urged communities to think twice before rejecting investments that could revitalize their towns.

Hurst says he believes that history is on his side.

He noted that every major technological shift, from the Industrial Revolution to the rise of the internet, has sparked fear and resistance, but ultimately, life has continued.

"People have always been scared of new technologies," he said. "But in the end, life goes on, and we should embrace advancements and investments into local communities."

He warned that if rural areas continue to say no to new opportunities, they will only accelerate their own decline.

"If we do that," he said, "we have to drive through all these small towns with blinders on our eyes, because it is not perfect and it is headed the wrong direction."

In his final line from the piece, he put his message bluntly.

"At some point, decline is a choice. We shouldn't choose more of it."

For Hurst, he says the choice is clear: adapt and grow, or watch rural Missouri continue to shrink.