A Young Populist Heats Up the Texas Agriculture Commissioner Race

Betting big against data centers

Tucker has bet big on the backlash to data centers that has engulfed the country. Whether on the trail or on social media, he is quick to raise the concerns of farmers, rural communities and common Texans who are paying the price for the rollout of these massive warehouses—such as the planned 1,100-acre Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas—which serve as the physical infrastructure of the artificial intelligence boom.

Many progressives hope this issue will do something that hasn’t been done in a generation: attract rural voters to the Democratic ticket. Data centers are wildly unpopular. A recent poll found that 56% of Texans oppose data centers being built in their community.

To Tucker, the data center issue is one of local control. Major corporations like Oracle, Amazon and Meta have been sucking up Texas’s scarce water and energy resources at the public expense, receiving more than $1 billion in tax breaks each year. When local communities try to slow their development, they are often met with fierce industry resistance and even lawsuits.

In early May, Hill County, north of Waco, became the first county in the state to pass a moratorium on data center construction. A month later, the county rescinded its moratorium after a data center developer filed a federal lawsuit, claiming the county “exceeded its lawful powers” in passing the one-year moratorium, which threatened the company’s existing contracts to buy more than 800 acres of land for a data center project.

Tucker was early in calling out data centers, but Republicans are now reacting to the data center unpopularity. Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has made AI regulation a priority for the upcoming legislative cycle. And, after earlier hailing Texas “the epicenter of AI development,” Gov. Greg Abbott has reversed course. He recently ordered the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to enforce a set of restrictions on data centers, including requiring them to “fully fund the costs of electric infrastructure.”

 “We must prohibit them [data center companies] from building AI data centers in rural Texas neighborhoods,” Abbot said at a recent campaign stop in East Texas.

Nate Sheets, the Republican nominee for agriculture commissioner, has echoed the recent concerns made by Texas Republicans.

“We have a responsibility to make sure that growth works for Texans, not against them,” he told Barn Raiser. “Texans shouldn’t be forced to subsidize private infrastructure projects, and companies need real plans to address electricity demand, water use, and impacts on local communities.”

Noting that the office does not regulate zoning, he argued that the best way to help Texas farmers was by improving the rural economy.

“Texas is losing roughly 68 farms every week because the economics of agriculture no longer work for too many families,” Sheets said. “When farmers and ranchers can’t make a living on the land, they’re increasingly forced to sell it for other uses, including data centers.”

Come November, the issue will remain contested ground for both parties. There are currently 248 proposed data center projects in Texas and much confusion about their oversight. Recently, when the Public Utility Commission of Texas requested that data centers report on their water usage to the state, only one-third responded. Texas counties rank among the nation’s most expensive for electric bills, and the state is poised to overtake Virginia as the nation’s top data center hub by 2030.

“If the Internet were TNT,” Tucker wrote in a recent Houston Chronicle op-ed, “AI is an atom bomb. One can be useful, but the other can destroy us.”

Break ’em up

When it comes to agriculture, Tucker blames monopolies for the woes of Texas farmers and ranchers.

Farmland and ranchland is being lost in Texas at an alarming rate. According to a 2025 Texas A&M Natural Resources Institute report, between 2020 and 2025, Texas lost 17,000 agricultural operations, while 3.7 million acres of agricultural “working lands” were transferred to “non-agricultural uses.”

A combination of agricultural consolidation and real estate demand from Texas’s growing population have put the squeeze on small operations. Big Ag in Texas has used so-called “right-to-farm” laws to squash local regulation of industrial farms and undercut competition from small operations. For example, in the Panhandle, small cattle ranchers are literally being choked out by “fecal dust” from the feedlots that have overtaken the area in recent decades. Texas’s “right to farm” laws protect these big feedlot operations from nuisance claims filed by their neighbors. In recent years, Texas has passed additional laws strengthening Big Ag operators from environmental and nuisance complaints.

According to Tucker, not only has monopolization led to the decline of small and family-owned ranching and farming operations, but free trade policies such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have damaged local supply chains to make Texas dependent on importing its own food.

“Texas used to be a breadbasket … now we’re a net importer of food,” Tucker told me in a podcast interview earlier this year. And in South Texas, the consequences of this lopsided system are glaring.

In “the RGV [Rio Grande Valley] mega breadbasket, fantastic soil, fantastic area for growing food, and you have food deserts literally next to farms,” he said. This means it is harder for small farming and ranching operations to survive and the cost of food goes up.

What the Texas agriculture commissioner does

The Texas agricultural commissioner has a wide mandate. It is responsible for the promotion, protection, and regulation of Texas’ $32 billion agricultural industry. On Hightower’s watch it also took over management of Texas’ organic certification. It is also responsible for rural economic development, managing U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) programs in Texas, and is supposed to protect consumers and workers in the industry. Since former Gov. Rick Perry kicked off the GOP sweep of Texas in 1990, protecting workers and consumers has been less of a priority.

Beyond these official roles, the Texas agriculture commissioner has traditionally enjoyed a large bully pulpit, something the current agriculture commissioner, Republican Sid Miller, regularly employs, often for his own benefit. While feuding with the Texas legislature over the state budget, Miller spent $91,000 on stickers with his name prominently placed on gas pumps across Texas putting the blame on gas prices on Congress and the legislature, and reminding Texans the agriculture commissioner is not responsible for gas prices.

Though a stalwart Republican, Miller has been willing to buck the party line. On June 11, Tucker and Miller addressed a packed room in Matagorda County, where concerned Texans rallied against data centers. The data center issue has people fired up, but the question remains whether it will translate to votes.

Tucker ran unopposed in the Democratic Primary. In his 2020 run for the state senate, he lost by nearly 40 points to a Republican. He is now up against a well-funded Republican opponent, Nate Sheets, who beat out Miller in the Republican primary by an estimated 100,000 votes.

Sheets, owner of the successful national brand Nate’s Honey, received the endorsement of Gov. Abbott. His honey business is a major importer of honey from South America.

“Rural Texas won’t come back until family farms and ranches make money again,” Sheets told Barn Raiser. “That means changing the economics of agriculture so more of every food dollar stays with Texas producers instead of multinational food companies and middlemen.”

Sheets also said the concentration of beef processing operations has hurt small ranchers.

“Today a handful of multinational corporations control much of the market, and that’s bad for ranchers,” he said, adding that as agriculture commissioner, he would “fight to expand Texas-owned meat processing capacity so ranchers have more competitive markets.” Like Tucker, he also supports Country of Origin Labeling (COOL).

Sheets is a major recipient of funding from the Texas Farm Bureau, a major lobbying force behind Big Ag that supports positions like “right-to-farm” that have hurt small producers.

Sheets has deep roots in establishment Republican politics. He claims Rick Santorum, the former Senator from Pennsylvania, was who encouraged him to run for office in 2025. Those connections helped his campaign amass more than $2.4 million compared to Tucker’s $225,000.

During the Republican primary, Sheets ran up the numbers in Texas’ big cities, while Miller won in rural Texas. The Texas GOP establishment relies on rural voters, but its power players are based in the biggest cities. The limited effect of Trump’s endorsement of Miller signals clearly that the Texas GOP establishment wanted Miller out. 

Sheets’s victory wasn’t just his own. It was part of a longstanding feud between Miller and Abbott. Notably, even though Miller won Trump’s endorsement, a host of Texas industry groups and Texas GOP leaders backed Sheets. Miller had strongly considered a bid to challenge Abbott, and over the years had clashed with the governor, particularly over the governor’s 2022 closing of the border with Mexico and his 2020 decision to extend early voting. Sheets’s victory was Abbott’s final act in a years-long attempt to unseat Miller. And Sheets intends to erase Miller’s legacy.

“We’re going to fire every one of the cancerous people that were pro-Sid and clean house,” Sheets said in a March interview with The Texas Tribune.

The New World screwworm

While Sheets has powerful allies and plenty of money, Tucker has an advantage of some blame based on GOP incompetence: the return of the New World screwworm (NWS), a small fly whose larvae burrow like a screw into the open wounds of an animal and consume its living flesh.

On June 3, the USDA confirmed the first U.S. case of NWS since it was eradicated in the country in the 1970s. USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins has blamed, without evidence, immigrants for bringing in the pest, while Democrats blame DOGE-induced austerity for the outbreak. Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts included a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) program designed to monitor and fight NWS. While the NWS was approaching the state, Secretary Rollins and the USDA downplayed the threat. After Republican state Rep. McLaughlin claimed on June 2 that the NWS was only a mile from the border, Rollins rebuked him.

“When that false information gets out, it causes significant panic,” she said,  claiming the NWS was 25 miles from Texas. In an embarrassing turn, the next day, the USDA confirmed the first case of screwworm in Texas, in La Pryor, Texas, roughly 50 miles inside the border.

Sheets and Tucker see the solution for the New World screwworm very differently. For the most part, Sheets has backed Brooke Rollins’s plan to use sterile flies to decimate the population. This technology was first used to push the screwworm out of Texas. But Tucker argues that this is too slow, with the USDA planning to open its facility in 2027. Tucker has argued for a multi-pronged approach, specifically using SWASS (Screwworm Adult Suppression System) to eradicate fertile screwworm flies using sterile flies to keep the NWS out once the population has diminished.

“Sterile Insect Technique has a decades-long track record of successfully eradicating New World screwworm,” Sheets told Barn Raiser. “SWASS could have a role if conditions change, but deploying it broadly today could also kill the sterile flies we’re relying on, along with bees, butterflies, and every other pollinator in the area.”

Sheets denied funding cuts have played a role.

“The USDA’s sterile fly eradication program, the tool that actually stops screwworm, was never cut. What DOGE cut was a UN [United Nations] monitoring contract that had already failed.”

Interestingly enough, Miller agrees with Tucker and has been pleading with the USDA to use every tool at their disposal. It is very likely that the NWS crisis will only accelerate as the state heads into the midterms, giving Tucker a fresh example of the consequences of GOP mismanagement.

NWS aside, with Republicans beginning to address data center outrage, Tucker will have to connect to other issues of democracy and monopoly power if he wants to win. While regulation of data centers largely lies outside of the purview of the agriculture commissioner, Tucker has an advantage. His political upbringing under Hightower has taught him that the Texas agriculture commissioner can serve as a voice for the forgotten farmers and ranchers. Populist Hightower served them in the 1980s, a century after rural Texans found their voice in the Farmers’ Alliance in Lampasas, Texas.

But it’s a tall task. A Democrat hasn’t won statewide office in Texas since 1994, and Tucker’s fate will largely be defined by James Talarico at the top of the ticket. Tucker and Talarico can take a page from Ann Richards and Jim Hightower’s book. As the pair rose in the 1980s, they campaigned together as part of a progressive slate. Clawing Texas back from GOP rule today will take similar unity.

David GriscomMore by this author →

David Griscom is the author of The Myth of Red Texas: Cowboys, Populism, and Class War in the Radical South. He hosts the podcast Left Reckoning and the Jacobin Show for Jacobin Magazine and writes the Texas politics newsletter on Substack The Rattler. He lives in Austin, Texas.