Mary Rooke Commentary and Analysis Writer
Ida Huddleston and her daughter, Delsia Bare, have rejected a combined offer of about $26 million to sell part of their family’s farmland for a proposed data center.
Huddleston turned down $60,000 per acre for her 71-acre property in Mason County, Kentucky, from an anonymous Fortune 100 company widely understood to be a major player in artificial intelligence (AI), according to LEX18. Huddleston would have received roughly $4.26 million had she accepted. Bare declined $48,000 per acre for her 463-acre portion, amounting to more than $22 million. The offers dwarfed local farmland values, which hover around $6,000 per acre.
The women chose instead to hold fast to land that has sustained their family and, by extension, the nation for generations. They have become a symbol that captures the full embodiment of the American spirit. Their reasons cut to the heart of what it means to value something beyond dollars. (Sign up for Mary Rooke’s weekly newsletter here!)
Huddleston described the persistent offers as “mind harassment.”
“What they’ve proposed and carried on it’s not a business deal, it’s a mind harassment,” she told LEX18.
“I said I don’t want your money, I don’t need your money, but I do feel sorry for everybody around us. They’re gonna be affected by it,” she said.
“They call us old, stupid farmers, you know, but we’re not,” Huddleston continued. “We know whenever our food is disappearing, our lands are disappearing, and we don’t have any water, and that poison. Well, we know we’ve had it.”
“I’m staying put,” she added.
When asked about the potential jobs that might have come from the project, Huddleston called it “a scam.”
“I say they’re a liar, and the truth isn’t in them. That’s what I say. It’s a scam,” Huddleston told WKRC/Local 12.
When listening to Bare’s message, it’s hard not to see how important the land is to her identity and how she sees it as part of her birthright and American mission.
“Stay and hold and feed a nation, $26 million doesn’t mean anything,” Bare told LEX18.
“My grandfather and great-grandfather and a whole bunch of family have all lived here for years, paid taxes on it, fed a nation off of it,” Bare told Local12. “Even raised wheat through the Depression and kept bread lines up in the United States of America when people didn’t have anything else.”
She compared her bond to the land to Scarlett O’Hara’s attachment in “Gone with the Wind.”
“As she was attached to that land,” Bare said, “Her spirit never would die. That’s the exact same thing for me right here. As long as I’m on this land — as long as it’s feeding me — as long as it’s taking care of me — there’s nothing that can destroy me if I’ve got this land.”
Huddleston and Bare were not alone in their resistance. In December, LEX18 reported on nearby landowners Andy Grosser and his father, Timothy, who rejected nearly $8 million for their farm at the same proposed site.
We don’t often hear people talk about the land this way. In fact, some are admonishing these women for rejecting the multi-million dollar offer. Reason reporter, Billy Binion, felt the move was foolish.
“The buyer offered them *ten times* what the land is worth. Take the money,” he said. “There will come a time when their farmland is not wildly overvalued like this. It’s very possible they’ll still lose it — maybe to eminent domain, where the government pays the family MUCH less for their trouble. If someone offers you 10x what something is worth, you take it.”
There will come a time when their farmland is not wildly overvalued like this. It’s very possible they’ll still lose it—maybe to eminent domain, where the government pays the family MUCH less for their trouble. If someone offers you 10x what something is worth, you take it.
— Billy Binion (@billybinion) March 24, 2026
What Binion and others like him do not understand, maybe because they’ve never owned anything real in their lives, is that these women possess real wealth. Their soil has been tended across generations, the knowledge passed from grandfather to granddaughter, the daily labor that puts food on tables for the entire country. This land fed people during the Depression, and the family sees its continued agricultural use as more important than a one-time financial windfall. (ROOKE: Irish Actress Used Oscars To Promote Something Completely Foreign To Hollywood Celebrities)
Farmers like these have always been the backbone of America. The naysayers are refusing to see that these farmers are safeguarding a national inheritance that cannot be bought back. Once you lose it, it is gone forever.
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