A Pennsylvania farmer turned down the chance to become a multimillionaire in order to preserve his land.
When a data center developer wanted to snap up 86-year-old Mervin Raudabaugh‘s 261 acres over two farms in Mechanicsburg, it dangled $15 million in front of the lifelong farmer.
But Raudabaugh turned the windfall down, choosing instead to transfer the land at a fraction of the offered price to a land trust.
“It was my life,” Raudabaugh told Fox 43 News of the land he has farmed for 50 years. “I told [the data center company] no, I was not interested in destroying my farms.
“That was really the bottom line,” he continued. “It wasn’t so much the economic end of it. I just didn’t want to see these two farms destroyed.
“Only the land that is preserved here is going to be here. The rest, every square inch, is going to get built on.”
Rather than see that happen, he sold development rights to a trust that will make sure the land is only ever used for agriculture.
Lancaster Farmland Trust (LTF), a nonprofit that preserves land in Cumberland County, compensated the farmer with about $2 million—a small percentage of what he could have earned if he’d turned his acres of lush farmland over for development as a hulking data center.
The land can still be sold in the future, but only to someone who will use it for agricultural purposes.
Pennsylvania and data centers
The state is a prime picking spot for data center development, due to its large plots of open farmland and proximity to transportation corridors and major power companies.
Last year, residents of Valley View Estates mobile park in Archbald, PA, got news that the owner of their community had entered into a binding sales agreement and that the new owners were linked to Project Gravity, a planned data center development that will span at least six buildings and 1.62 million square feet.
In Lackawanna County, there are at least 11 data center campuses proposed by developers, six of which are in Archbald. Commissioner Bill Gaughan has asked Gov. Josh Shapiro and the Pennsylvania General Assembly for a three-year statewide moratorium on new large-scale data center approvals to study their impact.
“I know Pennsylvanians have real concerns about these data centers and the impact they could have on our communities, our utility bills, and our environment,” Shapiro said at his Feb. 3 budget address. “And so do I.”
Saving land from development
Founded in 1988, the Lancaster Farmland Trust has since saved over 38,310 acres with 618 conservation easements.
The LTF can do so thanks to a voter-approved referendum passed in 2013, which allowed a slight increase to Silver Spring Township’s earned income tax in order to fund the conservation of farmland, forests, and open space.
The cost to taxpayers averages only about $120 per household annually, according to Lancaster Farming.
Once the land the easement is in place, the LTF “makes sure farmland remains a farm forever,” CEO Jeff Swinehart tells Realtor.com®.
While large plots of open land have long made business developers salivate, the risk of prime farmland being lost to data centers is somewhat new and rapidly increasing due to the expansion of AI.
Builders of data centers—which can include deep-pocketed companies such as Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), and Apple—can offer unprecedented paydays.
A preservation group like the LTF can compensate a landowner only about 20% of what the land is worth to a developer, says Swinehart, making it extremely difficult to compete in this market.
“Unfortunately, society views agricultural land as not in its highest and best use,” he says. “That it is ‘idle’ land waiting for some better use. So it becomes an easy target for any type of development.”
With older generations of farmers aging out of the agricultural life, it’s a pivotal time for the future of farmland.
“In a lot of cases, what we see is the tension between siblings when they’re left a farm property, and wanting to maximize the cash return on that asset,” says Swinehart.
“We’ve experienced numerous cases where it’s four, five, six siblings, and one may want to preserve [the land] and the others do not. So the default reaction is ‘We’ll just sell it.’ What does that mean for the landscape?”
Raudabaugh told media outlets that the data center builder (he did not name it) who approached him was relentless.
“These people have hounded the living daylights out of me,” Raudabaugh told Lancaster Farming. Realtor.com has reached out to Raudabaugh for comment.
The farmer’s deep connection to his land—he told one outlet that his mother died in his arms inside the barn—meant he had no interest in handing it over to a data center.
“They were, in his view, harassing him to the point that his attorney was considering filing against them in court,” Laura Brown, vice chair of the Silver Spring board of supervisors, told WHTM. Brown then approached the township’s land trust partner, LTF, for help.
Swinehart tells Realtor.com he doesn’t know the exact details of how the data center developer approached the elderly farmer, but his understanding of developers’ methods is that “they walk up farm lanes and knock on doors, and if they get a no, they come back again.”
The trust can’t compete with big-pocketed developers from a monetary standpoint, he says. “But where we can compete is in upholding the value that these farmers have for the land.
“There’s a legacy that farm families want to leave, but it’s deeper than the legacy of an individual. It’s a passion for the land itself, and the desire to make sure that the land can provide for continuing generations.”
And, for that, he says, passionate farmers such as Raudabaugh are “willing to give up significant monetary gain.”