By Scott Perry

John Spruill makes a fair point in his recent Albemarle Observer column: data centers are here to stay. Our phones, banks, hospitals, businesses, artificial intelligence systems, and nearly every part of modern life depend on them. See what Spruill had to say here.

But there is another question that deserves just as much attention.

Why must the future of computing consume the land that produces our food?

Washington County can look at the potential tax revenue from a data center and see a striking number. Spruill estimates that a hypothetical facility with $600 million to $800 million in taxable value could generate about $5.1 million to $6.8 million a year for the county. That is worth considering.

But farmland has value, too, and that value cannot be measured only by what it produces on this year’s county tax bill.

Washington County is part of one of North Carolina’s major agricultural regions. According to the 2022 Census of Agriculture, the county had 76,554 acres in farms, including more than 71,000 acres of cropland. Crops accounted for 99 percent of agricultural sales.

Once productive farmland is covered by massive buildings, substations, roads, transmission infrastructure, and other industrial development, restoring that land to agricultural production is no simple matter.

That brings up a bigger question — Are we valuing the land itself, or only the dollars it could generate by changing its use?

We Already Have a Water Problem

There is another part of this discussion that deserves much more attention: drainage.

Anyone familiar with agriculture in northeastern North Carolina knows that farming here is inseparable from water management.

Much of the Coastal Plain is extremely flat. NC State Extension notes that more than 90 percent of the Tidewater region east of U.S. 17 consists of poorly drained landscapes. Agriculture became possible across vast areas because generations built and maintained ditches, canals, drainage systems, and water control structures.

Our agricultural landscape is not simply dirt waiting for development. It is part of a complex hydrological system.

And that system is already under strain.

NC State researchers have documented saltwater intrusion in agricultural fields in northeastern North Carolina. Saltwater can enter through storm surge, wind-driven flooding, shallow groundwater, and the same ditch and canal networks historically used to drain farmland.

Research published in 2026 found that saltwater intrusion is intensifying along North Carolina’s Inner Banks, and artificially drained agricultural fields may be especially vulnerable because their drainage networks can also create pathways for saline water.

That ought to get everyone’s attention.

Before converting hundreds or possibly thousands of acres in northeastern North Carolina to industrial use, we should understand what changes to drainage patterns, impervious surfaces, roads, retention systems, and surrounding infrastructure could mean for neighboring farms and the larger drainage network.

What happens to the farmer downstream?

What happens after ten inches of rain?

What happens during a hurricane?

What happens when the receiving canals are already full?

What happens when saltwater pushes inland through those same drainage systems?

And eventually we have to ask an uncomfortable question:

Will traditional agriculture become increasingly difficult, forcing farmers to consider entirely different crops and farming systems to cope with wetter or salt-affected ground? Will we one day be talking about rice farming where corn, soybeans, potatoes, and other crops once grew?

That is not a prediction that Washington County is destined to become rice country. It is a question about where our land-use decisions will lead over generations.

Maybe the Long-Term Answer Is Above Us

There’s another possibility that sounds futuristic but is quickly becoming serious technology:

Put some of the world’s data centers in space.

This isn’t science fiction anymore.

In 2026, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that companies are actively developing space-based data centers, and that the FCC has received applications from U.S. companies proposing large satellite constellations to operate as data centers.

The advantages could be enormous.

An orbital data center does not consume hundreds of acres of farmland.

It does not require converting forests or agricultural fields into industrial campuses.

It does not compete with farmers for developable land.

It does not need a conventional local water supply.

And in the right orbit, enormous solar arrays could receive sunlight for much longer periods than terrestrial solar farms.

Most importantly for places such as northeastern North Carolina:

The computer doesn’t care whether it sits beside a soybean field or circles 500 miles above it. The soybean does.

There are still major engineering problems to solve. Heat is actually hard to dissipate in space because there is no atmosphere to carry it away. Radiation damages electronics. Launch costs remain high. Maintenance is difficult, and moving enormous amounts of information between Earth and orbit requires tremendous communications capacity.

So nobody should pretend that we can launch every terrestrial data center into orbit tomorrow.

But the technology is moving.

The GAO says space-based computing could cut the land, electricity, and water needed for data centers on Earth. Industry studies are now looking at whether orbital data centers could become technically and economically viable over the next decade.

That should be part of America’s long-term infrastructure discussion.

Progress Does Not Have to Mean Paving the Farm

There is nothing inherently wrong with data centers.

There is nothing wrong with Washington County wanting jobs, investment, or a stronger tax base.

But there is also nothing backward about protecting productive farmland.

Agriculture is infrastructure too.

Our drainage canals are infrastructure.

Our soils are infrastructure.

Our forests and wetlands are infrastructure.

And the ability of northeastern North Carolina to produce food is an economic resource that took generations to develop.

Technology changes extraordinarily quickly. Land does not.

A server installed today may be obsolete in a few years. A data-center design may be outdated in a decade. But once a large area of productive agricultural land becomes an industrial complex, that decision can affect the landscape for generations.

So perhaps the real question is not whether we support or oppose data centers.

The better question is:

Where should the data centers of the future be located, and what resources are we willing to permanently sacrifice to build them there?

Washington County can calculate the potential tax revenue from a data center to the dollar.

We should be just as serious about assessing the value of the farmland, drainage systems, agricultural economy, and way of life already there.

And while we are making that calculation, perhaps we ought to look beyond the next industrial site.

Perhaps we should look up.

Scott Perry is a local business leader, writer and historian.