$26 million. A Kentucky family turned it down. $15.7 million. A Pennsylvania farmer turned it down. $10 million, five times what he paid for the whole farm. He turned that down too. Right now, all over the country, tech companies are throwing life-changing money at family farms, and farmers keep saying no. That hasn't stopped them. Ida Huddleston, 82, and her daughter Delsia Bare turned down $26 million combined for their Kentucky farm. Land the family has worked since before the Civil War. Land that helped keep bread lines supplied during the Great Depression. "You can't get food out of a data center," Huddleston said. Bare admitted she briefly signed anyway, out of fear the company would simply use eminent domain and take the land regardless. She backed out once she realized what she was actually giving up. Their refusal didn't stop the project, it just got built around them. Enough neighbors sold that in May, Mason County rezoned 2,080 acres across 28 properties from agricultural to industrial, clearing the way for a data center that still, months later, has no public name. Huddleston and Bare's own 534 acres, mother's and daughter's land combined, were not part of it. Their land sits untouched right in the middle of what's now zoned for the project, the one piece the company couldn't get. County officials signed confidentiality agreements to keep the company's identity secret. A bill that would have stopped exactly this, banning local officials from signing NDAs with data center developers, passed the Kentucky House in a stunning 90-8 vote. Practically the whole chamber agreeing something was wrong. Then it vanished in the Senate. No vote, no explanation, no name attached. Even the lawmaker who wrote it says he doesn't know who killed it. Bare and her mother sued anyway. 🧵 1/3