Ida Huddleston, 82, and her daughter Delsia Bare, 54, own neighboring pieces of a family farm in Mason County that has been worked for nearly 200 years. Developers hunting land for a massive 2.2-gigawatt hyperscale data center offered Bare $48,000 an acre for 463 acres and Huddleston $60,000 an acre for her 71 acres. The total came to more than twenty-six million dollars. They signed papers at first. Then they found out what the land would become.
An artificial intelligence hub.
“Kick rocks and don’t come back,” Bare told the representative.
That six-word dismissal has turned these self-described “country hicks” into unlikely symbols of resistance against the latest wave of tech companies gobbling up productive American farmland. The story first broke wide through the Daily Mail and New York Post, and it is spreading because it cuts against the grain of everything the AI boom demands: more land, more power, more water, and less concern for the people who actually grow food.
Huddleston put the matter in plain spiritual terms. “What I believe in is something called Jesus Christ, and he said to occupy, wherever you’re standing, you occupy until he returns,” she said. “If I step off of this piece of property and it becomes something for an AI hub, then I have failed to occupy and I can be held accountable for that on the Judgment hour.”
That is not marketing language. That is a woman who understands stewardship. Her grandfather and great-grandfather raised wheat on that ground through the Depression and helped keep bread lines fed when the nation was hungry.
“You can’t get food out of a data center,” Huddleston has said repeatedly. Bare put it another way: even with $26 million in the bank, she would still rather sit in her own chair, drink her coffee, and eat her food where she has always done it.
