[marcuskane2]

This is much ado about nothing.

The US has so much excess capacity in farmland that we do absurd things with our excess corn and soybeans. We refine soybeans into ethanol to put into our gasoline. We feed corn to cows which kills them in fairly short order, but we just slaughter them before they die from the diet. We put high fructose corn syrup into everything. We use corn and soy derivatives for random industrial and chemical feedstock.

Data centers won't take up even .0001% of farm land, and "food production" wouldn't be meaningfully impacted unless we lost many, many orders of magnitude more land than that. This is panic about a rain drop in the ocean.

[gus_massa]

I agree.

> We refine soybeans into ethanol [...]. We feed corn to cows [...]

Did you mix them? Soybeans have a lot of protein that is good to grow muscle in cows. Corn is mostly starch that is cheaper than protein and starch is made of sugar that is easy to split in ethanol.

Also, there are more productive and less productive farms. Here in Argentina some of them operate only when the price of soybean or corn is high.