A Pennsylvania farmer has rejected a multi-million dollar bid for his land after being approached about building a data center on it.
Mervin Raudabaugh, 86, has spent seven decades working in agriculture, including the last 50 years farming the same property in Mechanicsburg.
In 2025, developers contacted him with an offer to purchase the land for a large data center project.
The proposal reportedly valued the property at $60,000 per acre. With 261 acres in total, the offer added up to more than $15 million — a sum that would dramatically change most people’s lives.
Raudabaugh, however, declined.
He later explained that his decision wasn’t driven by the size of the check, but by what he felt would be lost if the farms were replaced by development.
“It was my life,” he said. “I told [the data center developers] no, I was not interested in destroying my farms.”
He also stressed that money wasn’t the deciding factor: “That was really the bottom line. It wasn’t so much the economic end of it. I just didn’t want to see these two farms destroyed.”
Looking ahead, he expressed concern about how quickly open land is being converted: “Only the land that is preserved here is going to be here. The rest, every square inch, is going to get built on.”
After turning down the developers, Raudabaugh took additional steps to keep the property from being repurposed in the future.
He sold the development rights for the farm to the Lancaster Farmland Trust, a nonprofit focused on protecting farmland in Cumberland County.
The trust paid Raudabaugh $2 million — far less than the amount offered by the private developers.
For him, the trade-off was worth it because the agreement ensures the land can’t be converted to another use.
While the property may still change hands, any future buyer must keep it in agricultural production.
Jeff Swinehart, a representative of the Lancaster Farmland Trust, told FOX 43 that this kind of long-term thinking is common among local farm families.
He said: “We see from many farm families a desire to ensure that farm remains a farm forever and that it contributes to the local community.”
Raudabaugh said neighbors have supported the choice, both for the community and for the view the preserved land provides: “Friends of mine here are very happy with what I’ve done because they know that the building within their eye view here will be beautiful for quite a while.”