Sarah Taber

I need to double-check this math, but this is exactly the fact-check that Rolling Stone should have found someone to run for them.

It's wild how Rolling Stone tried to do stoichiometry & never thought to check in with a scientist or engineer before hitting publish.

So, what he said was "Let's stop making things up about water use."

He's had some stinker takes but this is accurate. The claims I'm seeing drive this conversation re: data center water use ("80% of the cooling water turns into steam!") are thermodynamically impossible.

Gotta be honest, I'm really not sure about that.

I'm still looking into it, but the "data centers turn 80% of the water that goes through them into steam!!" talking point that's driving a lot of the convo on this particular county seems... uh.... thermodynamically impossible.

Aquatic plants are great at removing nutrients from water that's on the surface (streams, rivers, lakes, etc)

alas, not so good at stripping nutrients out of the entire aquifer down to depths of tens or hundreds of feet. which is where that county is currently at

Will do o7

That's Dr. Gebru. And she does ethics of "what are we training the software to do?" She's great with it- and it just doesn't have much to do with this.

Because the issue here isn't software. It's a pretty straightforward "politics of natural resource use" problem.

wat

That's correct, my expertise is in managing irrigation and agricultural wastewater (among other things). Which is exactly what the story's about.

The journalist tried to write a story that they weren't fully qualified to understand. Not the first time, won't be the last.

Bingo. That's what grinds my gears about making this into an "oh no data centers" problem.

That implies that it's new, & restricted to where there are data centers. Absolutely not the case. This is bog standard for rural areas with a lot of livestock, & has been for decades.

wat

None of that should be happening. Source: am a crop scientist. What the county's been doing w their water supply is honestly pretty shocking.

I read it. The "concentrating the nitrate" argument is bunk. The water goes to a sewage plant after that.

The problem is the county cheaped out & only built half a sewage plant. So they just spray nitrate-heavy water on the ground for disposal.

Really appreciate your thread here. People are very eager to be critical of new tech infrastructure but seem to treat the existing hideous pollution that we live with as a normal and immutable fact of life that nobody is responsible for.

I'm sure that's true locally, this is how scapegoating works

I'm talking about folks on social media

Yeah I could be wrong but it feels very much like a case of

"Journalist documents local corruption, where the corrupt people are blaming Amazon to avoid responsibility" -> "Editor makes the headline about data centers bc nobody will click on stories about local corruption"

Just gonna leave it here for now: I really wish someone. anyone. had read the article before firing off their hot takes.

Now that all the chickens are coming home to roost & lawsuits are starting to fly, the ag players are *blaming* Amazon.

In the hopes that Amazon will have to pay out for those lawsuits instead of them.

And they can keep on doing what they've always been doing!

It's late & I'm not doing a full dive on it rn but wow. I am really, really disappointed with the response to the article.

RS laid out the whole story. In detail. Local ag interests been tearing up the county's water supply for 30+ years.

This is one of the clearest, best-documented cases of "corrupt local leaders sell off public natural resources for personal gain" that you'll ever see printed in the news.

And somehow everybody just... missed that part?

Listen I'm boycotting Amazon like everyone else

But that county has multiple megadairies & a history of manure spills. A few minutes of searching pulled up one dairy with 28,000 cows, another with 70,000 cows.

Respectfully, how does anyone think *Amazon* is the reason their water is a mess?

'The Precedent Is Flint': How Oregon's Data Center Boom Is Supercharging a Water Crisis Amazon data centers constructed in eastern Oregon's farmland have worsened a water pollution problem that’s been linked to cancer and miscarriages.

Rolling Stone: clearly documents a 30+ year long con job. A rural county's own leadership lined their pockets by helping ag interests destroy the water supply.

Everyone who read the article apparently??: Amazon data centers did this in 2011

www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

Screenshot of YouTube backend. It shows 98,760 subscribers, and a graph with a steady upslope of 300-600 new subscribers per day.

now taking wagers on when the YouTube channel hits 100K

The dang thing is it works!

Shoutout to the old heads at farm jobs over the years who got me in the "warmup & PT before starting work, you 20-something IDIOT" habit a long time ago.

Preventative maintenance goes a long way! Then you're already in the habit when it becomes mandatory.

Yeah that's just standard quality assurance

Food shipments get flagged for QA issues all the time, and the solution is "then they fix it." It's not... like... a huge shift in international trade or anything going on here.

It wasn't even the soybeans that had the problem.

The cargo ships that carried the soybeans had OTHER cargo holds with wheat in them. The wheat had pesticide levels that were too high.

So the grain terminals that filled those ships have to clean up before their shipments can be accepted in China.

China bans five Brazilian soy exporters after cargo issue Pesticide-tainted wheat in ship’s hold triggers soy facility suspensions

If you're seeing headlines about how China is "switching back to US soybeans" after Brazil's turned out to be contaminated

LOL no. It's like 5 facilities and 69K tons of soybeans.

Out of ~2,000 facilities and ~100M tons of beans shipped from Brazil to china.

www.thepoultrysite.com/news/2025/11...

Yeah the video gets into it

but if you must know posthaste, I recommend googling "cattle cycle"

Yep unfortunately that's how it goes with raising cattle on land that's extremely marginal for it. Nature calls your bluff.

That's really pushed along by how you can get a big break on your land's property taxes by farming/ranching it. It can really people to do things that the land can't support.

Yep a few do! But to pull it off, you have to be able to raise cattle all the way from birth to finished fattened beef.

And if your land is productive enough to marble a steer, you can do a LOT more profitable things with it than "game the cattle cycle 1 year out of 4 or 5."

The average slaughter weight for cattle has gone way up since the '60s.

More meat from fewer cows.