Cloudy skies. Windy this evening. Low 56F. SSW winds at 20 to 30 mph, decreasing to 10 to 15 mph. Higher wind gusts possible..
Cloudy skies. Windy this evening. Low 56F. SSW winds at 20 to 30 mph, decreasing to 10 to 15 mph. Higher wind gusts possible.
Updated: April 21, 2026 @ 4:19 pm
This solar farm near Covington, Oklahoma, was one of the first in the state built in 2018. Now the number of solar farms is growing rapidly. “I think there’s more opportunity to get in on solar than there was with wind energy,” says Shannon Ferrell, an agricultural law specialist at Oklahoma State University.
Harry Shenk, who lives on 39 acres near Partridge, Kansas, is a former teacher and mini-barn builder who started a company that builds chicken tractors. He was a first-time vendor at the annual Okie Homesteading Expo in Pryor. “More and more people want to have their own eggs,” he said. “You can harvest eggs out of your backyard that are just different from what you can get in the store. It’s a whole different commodity and a tiny step toward food sufficiency.”
Jill Pugh traveled from Irwin, Missouri, to attend the Okie Homesteading Expo in Pryor. “We have a large garden, we have fruit trees and bushes, raise turkeys and chickens and geese and process them ourselves. I sell eggs and give a lot of them away. I want to raise as much of our food as I can and share it with my family because I know it’s good for us,” she said.
Neighbors, friends and business partners Rachel Pritchett, left, and Brandi Barnsworth are co-founders and organizers of the annual Okie Homesteading Expo. Along with their husbands, they create content for social media channels Hidden Heights Farm and Keeping it Dutch.
Harry Shenk, who lives on 39 acres near Partridge, Kansas, is a former teacher and mini-barn builder who started a company that builds chicken tractors. He was a first-time vendor at the annual Okie Homesteading Expo in Pryor. “More and more people want to have their own eggs,” he said. “You can harvest eggs out of your backyard that are just different from what you can get in the store. It’s a whole different commodity and a tiny step toward food sufficiency.”
Data centers are driving up energy demand and fueling a renewables gold rush, but the potential windfall comes with concerns about the strain on natural resources and rural utilities and landscapes altered for decades to come.
Perhaps no place in Oklahoma better illustrates the uneasy convergence of past and future than Pryor, a town of less than 10,000 located 45 minutes northeast of Tulsa in the foothills of the Ozarks.
Since 2011, its industrial park has been home to the state’s first and largest data center. In more recent years, two entrepreneurs started an annual homesteading festival at the fairgrounds just a few miles away, which now attracts thousands to do-it-yourself workshops on home-butchering, cheesemaking, food preservation and storing food off-the-grid.
Oklahoma’s rural character, including its abundance of open land, ample surface water and some of the cheapest energy rates in the country, has captured the attention of the world’s largest artificial intelligence firms, according to state officials.
“We’re very well positioned to get more data centers, and the investment it represents is huge,” said Oklahoma’s Secretary of Energy Jeff Starling at the annual meeting of the Oklahoma Association of Conservation Districts.
AI firms have spent more in the last three years than the entire investment it took to build America’s interstate highway system, according to Starling, who is running for state attorney general.
He said the data buildout is about more than economic development, it’s a national security issue. “We have to win the race with China,” he said.
This solar farm near Covington, Oklahoma, was one of the first in the state built in 2018. Now the number of solar farms is growing rapidly. “I think there’s more opportunity to get in on solar than there was with wind energy,” says Shannon Ferrell, an agricultural law specialist at Oklahoma State University.
As an energy-rich state, Oklahoma currently generates more than it consumes, he added, but that could change as more data centers come online.
To keep pace with projects already proposed, the surrounding region would need to double its energy production over the next ten years, the equivalent of 5,000 new wind turbines, he said.
A modern data center is essentially a massive warehouse with big cooling towers on the sides. While water use can run as high as 5 million gallons a day or more, new technical innovations are likely to reduce that, according to Starling. But there’s a catch. “They all require more electricity,” he said.
While natural gas is the cheapest form of energy, renewables are quicker to approve and build. Only two places in the world manufacture natural gas turbines for generation, and both are back-ordered, he said.
Brandi Barnsworth is co-founder of the Okie Homesteading Expo, which was started in 2022 by two neighboring couples that each run their own social media channels. The presence of the existing Google data center, one of the company’s largest, isn’t all that conspicuous, she said. What has been noticeable is the proliferation of solar farms in just the past year, many of which sprawl for miles.
The payouts from the panels are beneficial to some but haven’t been embraced by everyone, she said.
“Money talks, but from our perspective, we’re wanting to preserve our agricultural land,” she said. “We’ve put every investment we could into our land, because, like I was always told, they aren’t making any more of it.”
Legal experts say more farmers and ranchers are seeking advice on how to evaluate and negotiate leases for wind turbines, solar farms, data centers and related infrastructure such as transmission lines, substations and battery storage facilities.
Oklahoma State University agricultural law specialist Shannon Ferrell describes solar as “more egalitarian” than wind. The main site-selection considerations are cloud cover and proximity to grid infrastructure or data centers, he said.
He anticipates Oklahoma will eventually have 5 to 10 battery farms similar in size to an electrical substation. “That will allow these solar companies to sell energy on the spot market,” he said during a breakout session at the state conservation meeting.
He also predicts the state will see more developmental clusters like the Skeleton Creek project near Enid, which started with wind, then added solar, and more recently began constructing battery storage.
Currently, solar farms in Oklahoma account for less than 1 percent of the state’s total agricultural land, he said, while contributing millions in landowner payments and local property taxes.
Lease payments for solar typically range from $500 to $1,000 an acre, he said.
“This is real money we’re talking about,” he emphasized.
Jim Park, an attorney specializing in asset law, also provides legal consultation to landowners and agrees the income potential could far exceed anything ever seen on many farms.
He attended law school in Arkansas and got his master’s degree in Missouri but now lives in St. George, Utah, where he serves as CEO of Nutrimill, a company that sells countertop grain mills.
Jill Pugh traveled from Irwin, Missouri, to attend the Okie Homesteading Expo in Pryor. “We have a large garden, we have fruit trees and bushes, raise turkeys and chickens and geese and process them ourselves. I sell eggs and give a lot of them away. I want to raise as much of our food as I can and share it with my family because I know it’s good for us,” she said.
The environmental benefits associated with renewables can be a bit deceptive, he said.
“You’re sold something like renewable energy is really great for the environment. It’s just not super-great for your land and your environment,” he noted. “The pads they put in for those windmills, the power and energy needed, there’s just a lot that goes into it. But that has nothing to do with the money generation aspect. A renewables strategy could be amazing from a business perspective for you and your family, assuming the company’s reputable.”
In many ways, the homesteading movement would appear to be at odds with the trend toward electronics and automation. But while it emphasizes hand-crafting and home-growing, electronic communication still plays a big role in how modern homesteaders network, share information and generate revenue from what they grow and the content they create.
“In this movement, you can be as hands-on as you want to be, but there are also some technologies out there that can really assist homesteaders and farmers,” Barnsworth said.
This interdependency was not lost on vendors, speakers and visitors at the festival who said data center development is a complex issue.
Harry Shenk owns a business that manufactures Egg Cart’n mobile chicken coops west of Hutchinson at Partridge, Kansas. He said he hadn’t given much thought to data centers until he read about one being proposed near Great Bend. “I knew it was a hot-button topic, but I didn’t know why,” he said.
He learned more after talking to people in the Pryor area, particularly in regard to high water use.
Even so, e-commerce and social media requires technology and data, he pointed out.
“That data has to come from somewhere, so it’s a Faustian bargain,” he said. “You can’t be just pro-data or against data. We all live a complex mix of what lifestyle we want to have.”
Even natural resource advocates acknowledge the dilemma.
Colleen Thurston is director and producer of the documentary film Drowned Land, which recounts ongoing efforts to save the Kiamichi River in Southeastern Oklahoma from a hydro-electric generation project that was proposed and denied four times.
Ironically, her dad was a hydro-engineer who helped build dams in northeastern Oklahoma. She works in a media intensive field and recently screened her film on World Water Day at the Philbrook Museum, a Tulsa cultural treasure originally built with money made on oil and gas.
Following the showing, she voiced concern over long-term developmental pressures but also expressed optimism state leaders and tribal nations are more aware and better organized than when the first data centers arrived in the state.
Legislators introduced a flurry of bills this spring relating to everything from required infrastructural investment to data center decommissioning.
Neighbors, friends and business partners Rachel Pritchett, left, and Brandi Barnsworth are co-founders and organizers of the annual Okie Homesteading Expo. Along with their husbands, they create content for social media channels Hidden Heights Farm and Keeping it Dutch.
At the homesteading expo, keynote speaker Dr. Temple Grandin, a well-known livestock handling expert from Colorado State University, said her biggest concern was how to decommission massive data centers in the future. Computer chip design is changing rapidly, she noted in a conversation following her formal presentation.
“Right now we’re kind of at the limit of how small we can make a silicone chip without it short-circuiting out,” she said. “But there’s talk about making chips out of something other than silicone, some new material where maybe you could make the circuits twice as small as you do now. Then data centers will be half the size. What do you do with the data centers when the computers inside them become obsolete, when we’ve found out how to shrink them down to a fourth of their size?”
The long-term effect on rural landscapes was also on the mind of Jill Pugh, a former teacher from Irwin, Missouri who attended the festival.
She said she doesn’t think of herself as a homesteader but strives to be as self-sufficient as possible, raising backyard poultry, fruit trees and a large garden for her extended family.
As urban areas push more of their infrastructural needs out into rural areas, she worries locals don’t take the threat seriously enough.
She pointed to a large landfill at neighboring Lamar that now accepts trash from cities like Springfield and Joplin. Much of the refuge from the historic Joplin tornado ended up there.
“I think in our little community we ignore those things, unfortunately,” she said. “We have wind turbines in our county too, and I think there are problems with that. But the money’s big for bringing them in, so lots of people went along with it.”
What she’d rather see is “a bigger movement of people wanting to provide for themselves.”
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