Meet Your Neighbors: The Johnsons' Farm

Ray Johnson stands in his cornfield on a cold November morning, pointing toward the tree line that marks his eastern property boundary. "That's where they want to put the main building," he says. "Right where my grandfather planted the windbreak in 1952."

Ray and Linda have farmed this land for 40 years, raising corn and soybeans on 150 acres that have been in Linda's family since the 1920s. Their daughter Sarah graduated from Maplewood High in 2019. Their grandson takes the school bus past this field every morning.

Now NorthStar Computing is offering them what Ray calls "an obscene amount of money" to sell.

"They came to us first, before going to the county," Linda explains. "Made it sound like we'd be foolish not to take it. Said the data center was coming one way or another, and we might as well benefit."

But the Johnsons have watched what happened in other rural communities where data centers moved in. They've talked to farmers near facilities in Iowa and Nebraska. They know about the groundwater depletion, the noise, the traffic during construction, the empty promises about local hiring.

"We could take their money and retire to Florida," Ray says. "But then what? We watch our neighbors' wells run dry? Sarah's son grows up in a town that chose a quick payout over its future?"

The Johnsons aren't selling. They're the reason NorthStar had to pivot to pursuing the county rezoning route. And they're standing with the rest of us to fight this.

"This land fed families for a hundred years," Linda says. "I'm not letting it become a parking lot for someone else's cloud storage."