Steve Griffin

Husband, Dad, Remodeling Consultant and Trail Runner

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Finnish scientists trucked in real forest dirt and grass and laid it over the gravel at four daycare yards. They let the kids dig around in it for a month. The blood tests came back with changes the researchers hadn’t expected to see so fast or so clear.

The study ran at ten daycares in two Finnish cities with 75 kids aged three to five. Four of the yards got the forest treatment: about a tennis court worth of soil and grass laid over the gravel, plus planters and peat blocks the kids could dig and climb on. Three others stuck with their normal gravel yards. The last three were daycares where the kids were already visiting real forests every day.

After one month, the variety of bacteria living on the kids’ skin shot up, and the kind that helps train the skin’s immune defenses jumped the most. Their gut bacteria started to look like the gut bacteria of the forest-visiting kids. Their blood showed more of the immune cells whose job is to keep the body from freaking out at harmless stuff like pollen and peanuts, and overall inflammation dropped. The kids on the plain gravel yards showed none of this.

Childhood asthma in the US doubled between 1980 and 1995. Food allergies in kids jumped 50 percent between 1997 and 2011, then jumped another 50 percent between 2007 and 2021. And peanut allergies in one-year-olds tripled between 2001 and 2017.

The Finnish researchers think one of the reasons is simple: kids today don’t get dirty enough. 37 percent of American preschoolers now spend an hour or less outside on a normal weekday. Their immune systems are getting trained in environments stripped of the bacteria humans have always lived around.

Aki Sinkkonen, who led the study, put it in plain words: “It would be best if children could play in puddles and everyone could dig organic soil.” The Finnish government is now helping pay for daycares across the country to make the same changes.

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

The data center developers offered him sixty thousand dollars an acre for the two hundred and sixty-one acres he had been farming for sixty years. That worked out to more than fifteen million dollars. They came back when he refused. They called his house. They turned up uninvited. His lawyer, by the time the harassment escalated, was preparing legal action against them. The farmer, an eighty-six-year-old Pennsylvanian named Mervin Raudabaugh, did not sell. He called the township instead. He accepted a conservation easement valued at roughly two million dollars. He gave up thirteen million dollars in cash. The land, in exchange, can never be developed.

Mervin Raudabaugh had been working the same two hundred and sixty-one acres of farmland in Silver Spring Township, Pennsylvania, for more than sixty years. He had milked cows on that land for fifty-one of those years. He had raised four children inside the farmhouse that sat on it. His mother had died in his arms in one of the barns. The fields ran along the I-81 corridor in central Pennsylvania, in a part of the state where the soil was old and good and where, until recently, the property had been worth what farmland is generally worth in that region.

Then the data centers came looking.

The artificial intelligence boom of the last several years has created an unprecedented appetite for industrial server farms. The buildings that house these data centers need cheap, flat, well-connected land in places with reliable power and good highway access. The I-81 corridor in Pennsylvania, with its proximity to East Coast population centers and its existing electrical infrastructure, has become one of the most desirable stretches of farmland in the country, for reasons that have nothing to do with farming.

The developers approached Raudabaugh with an offer. They were prepared to pay him sixty thousand dollars an acre. For his two hundred and sixty-one acres, that worked out to slightly more than fifteen million dollars.

He said no.

They came back. They called his house. They turned up at his door. He told them no again. They called again. They returned again. The pressure became, by Raudabaugh's own account, severe enough that his lawyer began preparing legal action against the developers to make them stop. He told a local reporter that the developers had hounded the living daylights out of him.

His position did not change.

He was not interested in destroying the farms, he said. That was the bottom line. It was not, in his own framing of it, primarily about the money. He was eighty-six years old. He had spent his entire adult life on those acres. He had decided, at some point, that he was not going to be the man who turned them into a data center.

There was, however, the question of what would happen after him.

None of his four children were planning to take over the farm. Most American children of dairy farmers, in the current generation, have not gone into farming, and Raudabaugh knew his children had not made an exception. If he simply held the land for the rest of his life and passed it to his heirs, the next decision about its use would not be his to make. The same developers, or new ones, would approach the children. The next offer might be even higher. The land could become a data center under his own grandchildren's signatures.

He called the township.

Silver Spring Township is one of only four municipalities in the entire state of Pennsylvania where voters have agreed to dedicate part of their own local income taxes to a farmland preservation program. The voters of the township had chosen, collectively and at their own expense, to tax themselves so the township could buy development rights on farmland and retire those rights permanently. Working with the Lancaster Farmland Trust, the township arranged for an appraisal of Raudabaugh's property. They offered him the full appraised value for a conservation easement on his land.

The figure was approximately two million dollars.

It was one-eighth of what the data center developers had been offering.

Raudabaugh accepted it.

A conservation easement, in legal terms, is a permanent restriction written directly into the title of the property. Raudabaugh still owns the land. He can still sell it. He can still pass it to his children. He can still farm it or lease it to other farmers. What he cannot do, and what no future owner of the property will ever be able to do, is develop it. The acres cannot become a data center. They cannot become a warehouse. They cannot become a shopping center, a housing development, or any other piece of constructed infrastructure. They can only ever be farmland.

The restriction is permanent. It runs with the title. It applies to anyone who ever holds the deed, in any year, under any market condition.

He gave up roughly thirteen million dollars in cash to make that guarantee.

The reasoning he offered, when local journalists asked him about the decision, was not financial. It was a reasoning that does not appear often in the contemporary American economic conversation about land. He had spent sixty years on those acres. He had watched his children grow up on them. His mother had taken her last breath inside one of the barns. He had decided that the place was worth something the developers' offer did not measure, and that the way to preserve that something was to put the protection in writing, in a form that no future offer could ever break.

His neighbors along the I-81 corridor, he noted in the same conversation, were still vulnerable. Most of the surrounding land was not under any kind of similar protection. He expected, in his own words, the rest of every square inch around him to get built on. The American farm family, he said, was in trouble.

His farm was not in trouble.

In a stretch of central Pennsylvania that is being aggressively converted, parcel by parcel, into industrial server infrastructure, two hundred and sixty-one acres are now guaranteed, for as long as American property law continues to function, to remain what they have been since the eighteenth century. Fields. Cows. Open ground.

He had been offered fifteen million dollars to make the land into something else. He had chosen, instead, two million dollars and a guarantee that it would stay what it had always been.

The data centers will get built somewhere. They will not get built on those acres.

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

Here's the truth about military deaths while the loathsome piece of shit was in office. 🎯🇺🇸👇

[Chris Mowrey @chrisdmowrey]

To republicans in congress: come to Georgia and look families in their eyes. I dare you.

[President Biden Archived @POTUS46Archive]

We must ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines again, require safe storage of firearms, enact universal background checks, and end immunity for gun manufacturers.

Thoughts and prayers are not enough.

[Steve Griffin @ChallengerPilot]

@givemethevin Really wanted to hear you bid the ‘72 Bug - hope Ur able to get the new BFE studio issues worked out

[Steve Griffin @ChallengerPilot]

@SageCanaday I’ve seen fast ducks and slow ducks on the trail, they all seemed to run just fine…

[Steve Griffin @ChallengerPilot]

@ameliaboone I live in the highest population density area of Dallas. I love downtown and the city life, but I spend as much time as possible on the trails and in the rugged remote mountains of Eastern Oklahoma and Arkansas. I go on vacations to further away mountains. Best of both worlds 🤪

[Steve Griffin @ChallengerPilot]

Check out Foxhaven Park Trail Run on @relivecc! #GetOutThere https://t.co/nuNCw9IdiR

[Steve Griffin @ChallengerPilot]

Check out Bentonville Back 40 Trail Run on @relivecc! #GetOutThere https://t.co/WmnZ3idm63

[MeidasTouch @MeidasTouch]

Ted Cruz voted against our 9/11 responders. He also refused to help our veterans who were exposed to toxic burn pits.

[MeidasTouch @MeidasTouch]

If President Biden didn’t win the election, it’s likely the world would be in chaos right now. Ukraine would have been left to be overtaken the Russians. Putin would be threatening the entire West. Instead, Ukraine stands strong. Putin has never been weaker. Democracy lives.

[Houston Chronicle @HoustonChron]

None of Texas' quality of life metrics were in the top 50 percent of U.S. states, according to a new report.

The study found weaknesses in the state's childcare, health resources, inclusiveness and voting rights. https://t.co/80jlLs3dr6

[Elizabeth Hidalgo Reese (Yunpovi) @yunpovi]

This #SCOTUS opinion in Castro Huerta is horrifying and insulting to Indian people and tribes.
I’m shaken.
Every few paragraphs of the majority opinion has another line that dismissively and casually cuts apart tribal independence that Native ancestors gave their lives for.

[Beto O'Rourke @BetoORourke]

It’s time for Texas to have a governor who cares about the people of this state.

[Steve Griffin @ChallengerPilot]

Steve's Off Road Truck Session - SpeedVegas w/ Robbie https://t.co/4yOiTOjgY3 via @YouTube

[Steve Griffin @ChallengerPilot]

https://t.co/La0Pv4qulG

[Steve Griffin @ChallengerPilot]

Want to win 🧦Socks. For Life. 🧦from @DarnTough? Seriously, they really are that good 👉 #MadeInUSA #LifetimeGuarantee https://t.co/GeLZa7rLkf