EDITORIAL: Farmland matters because county’s character counts

Watching the land acquisition process for the Port Washington data centers is like being a spectator at a high-stakes Monopoly game played with towering stacks of funny money. 

It seems like a game because the prices paid for land by the data center developer are so out of scale with what was once considered reality that it is hard to believe genuine dollars are being exchanged.

But they are the real thing, of course, as sellers can happily attest. In the latest mind-boggling transaction, 2.55 acres sold for $6 million. The land is not contiguous with the acreage annexed to the city last year, but it is close enough that the owner, who operates a towing business there, had complained of incessant dust from the data center construction site.

The nearly 2,000 acres acquired for the data centers were purchased for amounts unheard of in Wisconsin for rural land sales. One farming family was paid $20 million. A resident with a home on 65 acres received $3.44 million. Vantage has so far spent roughly $140 million to buy Port Washington land.

Most, if not all, of the owners were not trying to sell their land. Some planned to live on it or work on it for years to come, maybe pass it on to their children. Some were vehemently opposed to parting with their property. But it is fair to say that an offer of 20 times higher than the fair market value or more is an offer that can’t be refused, especially when the alternative is living next to a data center.

The message here is that data center developers can take all the land they want unless it is protected by local government zoning. Even that can be a porous defense. 

The Port data center land was zoned for agriculture by the Town of Port Washington, but that became irrelevant when it was annexed by the City of Port Washington and promptly zoned as a “technology campus district,” a land-use description specifically designed to accommodate the data centers.  

Nonetheless, zoning by town governments is the closest thing to a bulwark against the substantial loss of more of Ozaukee County’s remaining farmland, and town officials should stand by it because the cause is important.

Besides being the raw material of agriculture that is still a viable segment of the county and state economies, farmland keeps the countryside green. In the crop-growing season, thousands of acres of northern Ozaukee County turn green as fields of corn, soybeans, alfalfa, hay and wheat sprout and thrive.

Not a sea of green like the plains of Kansas, this is a verdant patchwork that includes the untillable land that is part of almost every farm, where  small forests, woodlots, brush and the wetlands that provide habitat for animals and plants can be found.

The towns have a strong ally in the Ozaukee County government, which in 2025 adopted an updated Farmland Preservation Plan that makes it possible for landowners in towns that have certified farmland preservation zoning districts to qualify for state tax credits by agreeing to keep their land in agricultural use.  

The Town of Belgium has the most land in the county’s Farmland Preservation Area with about 10,000 acres. The Town of Fredonia is also in the preservation program and has particularly strong zoning to prevent development that is not in keeping with its rural character. Town officials exercised that safeguard notably last year when they refused to rezone agricultural land for a large motorsport proving grounds and track in spite of its positive impact on the town tax base.

Rural and character are the two key words in the farmland preservation effort. Business investment is robust in Ozaukee County and rural land, especially parcels within range of annexation by cities and villages, will continue to be converted into sites for residential and commercial development. But this needs to happen in reasonable increments, because the county’s rural character is what distinguishes it as one of the most desirable places in Wisconsin to live and work.

The data center now under construction, with its utilitarian steel and concrete buildings sprawling over hundreds of once-green acres, is a wrenching example of how easily that character can be destroyed.

Their objectionable footprint on the landscape is one of the reasons the public has turned against data centers so emphatically that candidates from both political parties are stumbling over one another to prove their anti-data-center cred to voters.

This doesn’t mean data centers are going away or that new ones won’t be built. Even if the expected artificial intelligence extravaganza turns out to be underwhelming, data centers are essential to the way of life of these times. 

There has to be places for them, and there are. The country has thousands of superfund sites, places so contaminated that the Environmental Protection Agency has declared them a risk to human health and the environment and authorized clean-up with federal money. Many of these restored locations, also known as brownfields, were industrial sites that are close to the infrastructure needed for large industrial operations. They are good places for data centers.

Data centers belong on brown fields, not green fields.