CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

From CAFOs to Data Centers: Do Rural Residents Have the Right to Say “No”?

Cornfield at sunset, near Bean Blossom, Indiana. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Today’s data center proponents argue such projects bring needed jobs and a boost to local economies. Rural America has heard confident pitches like these before. Nearly 40 years ago, concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) arrived one barn at a time with bold promises of jobs and a county tax base.

By the time neighbors organized, right-to-farm laws and state pre-emption had severed the ground from under them. All the while, manure lagoons leached into the groundwater and fouled the air, shortening the life expectancy of the farmworkers and downwind neighbors.

Organizing still won real things, to be sure, from North Carolina’s CAFO moratorium in 1997 to Chris Jones’s clean-water campaign for agriculture secretary in Iowa today. When it comes to CAFOs, the lessons came late, but in the age of artificial intelligence, those same lessons can give rural communities a leg up.

While CAFOs crept into rural America, data centers are arriving as a land rush. This speed is both terrifying and an advantage. Texas alone has some 248 proposed data center projects, even though 56% of Texans tell pollsters they do not want one nearby, which means that, unlike the CAFO era, rural communities are asking questions before the statutes are locked in. And rural people need their voices to be heard. According to Pew Research Center, of the more than 1,500 data centers proposed or under development, 67% are in rural communities.

The ultimate question will be: Do rural residents have the power to say no?

The answer is playing out across the country. In November 2025, 800 people filled a board meeting to oppose a billion-dollar Meta-linked project in Howell Township, Michigan, and the developer withdrew. In February, the city council of San Marcos, Texas, rejected a $1.5 billion campus after nearly nine hours of public comment, then became the first Texas city to ban data centers through its zoning code. Fort Worth, Texas, is drafting data center zoning rules of its own.

Nationally, the poorest census tracts resist data center projects at five times the rate of the richest. Projects that meet resistance are cancelled at several times the rate of those that do not. One tracker counts tens of billions of dollars in blocked or delayed projects.

Opposition to data center projects is one of the few issues that many Americans agree on. A June Reuters/Ipsos pollfound that only 14% of respondents would support a data center being built in their community. On July 18, organizers held 142 protests across 42 states in the first nationwide protest against data centers and artificial intelligence.

Data center hyperscalers are copying the CAFO playbook as best they can. West Virginia has stripped its counties and towns of the power to regulate data centers; similarly, the state’s right-to-farm law prohibits local governments from bringing civil or criminal action against an agricultural operation as long as it meets state and........

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