David Senter of the American Agriculture Movement on what data centers are doing to rural water, land, and fire safety, and why opposition is growing.
A rural Texas fire chief has a plan for what happens if the data center going up near his town catches fire. According to David Senter, who says he knows the chief personally, it is blunt: "they just have to sit and watch it burn."
Senter is a fourth-generation Texas farmer and president of the American Agriculture Movement (AAM), a group that has represented family farmers and ranchers for close to fifty years. On episode 92 of For Humanity, he tells host John Sherman what he is hearing from farmers across rural America: wells running dry, land purchased with no public hearing, and a question few of these communities have had to answer before, which is whether their volunteer fire department could actually respond to a fire at one of these buildings.
His concerns are part of a broader shift in public opinion. According to an August 2026 poll from Heatmap News and Embold Research, 75 percent of Americans now say they oppose a data center being built near their home, up from roughly 43 percent just a year earlier.
Much of West Texas sits on part of the Ogallala Aquifer, a groundwater source that recharges far slower than it is being drawn down. Senter says farmers in the region are already watching wells, streams, and ponds dry up in areas where data centers have moved in, and that operators are often not required to report how much groundwater they use.
That concern has independent backing. A University of Texas at Austin research report found that, depending on growth and cooling technology, data centers could account for between 3 and 9 percent of the state's total water consumption by 2040. A single hyperscale campus can draw up to five million gallons a day, comparable to a small city. Five proposed or under-construction projects sit directly on or near the Ogallala, and in April 2026 more than 500 residents turned out to protest one of them near San Angelo. Tom Green County commissioners have since passed their own resolution calling for stricter state regulation of high-volume water use.
"That's a critical stage," Senter says of the aquifer. "A lot of areas used to be irrigated farmland. There's no water there left now."
The part of the conversation that stands out most is not about water. It is about what happens if one of these buildings ignites.
Large data centers run on tens of thousands of lithium-ion battery cells, and two existing fire codes, NFPA 855 and UL 9540, call for battery systems to be physically separated from the rest of a structure to contain exactly this kind of risk. According to Senter, that separation is not what he sees being built. "I'm not aware of any of the data centers having a segregated fireproof building for the batteries," he says. "It's cheaper just to do it like they're doing it."
The scale of the risk is not hypothetical. New York City's own experience with lithium-ion battery fires, mostly tied to e-bikes, offers a sense of what is at stake: at least 30 deaths and more than 800 fires since 2022, in a city with a full-time, professionally staffed fire department. Most of the rural land where data centers are being built is covered only by volunteer departments, made up of farmers and small business owners who respond to calls between their own jobs. Senter's account of what one fire chief told him reflects a concern that has surfaced elsewhere too. A fire department in Central Texas has separately gone on record with the same worry about a data center proposed in its own district.
Not every claim in this space has been independently confirmed, and Senter's account should be read with that in mind. In Bell County, Texas, rancher Alton Fowler has testified before the Texas House Committee on Natural Resources against a data center project he says would draw an estimated 2.5 million gallons of water a day, five miles from his family's farm. That testimony is a matter of public record.
Other claims are harder to verify. Senter says livestock near new data center sites "get as far away from that data center as they can" and no longer rest near them, a pattern several farmers have described publicly. An independent fact-check of similar viral claims about cattle stillbirths near Texas data centers found real concern from real farmers, but no veterinary or environmental study establishing a direct cause. It is an open question worth tracking, not a settled one.
Senter says AAM passed a unanimous resolution in January opposing data centers built on farm or ranch land, citing the absence of water reporting requirements, inspections, and community input. He also describes something he says he has not seen in years: opposition to data centers pulling in people who otherwise agree on very little politically.
"When you unite people from both sides of the aisle," he says, "politicians have not seen that in quite a long time."
Whether that coalition holds is still an open question, but the underlying pattern Senter describes, major infrastructure moving quickly into communities with the least oversight to slow it down, is one this show and this organization track closely in the AI industry more broadly. Data centers are the physical backbone of the systems being built and deployed today. The wells, the fire codes, and the county commission meetings are what that buildout looks like on the ground, long before any single AI model makes headlines.
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