Happy Thursday!
☕ Fill the mug, kick the dust off the boots, and let's talk about the day a Silicon Valley giant decided rural Alberta was the place to park $13 billion.
Meta is building its first Canadian data centre northeast of Edmonton, a used combine just sold for the price of a starter home, and there's a Hollywood western wrapping up in the coulees near Three Hills.
Let's dig in.
🌾 The Big Bin — Meta Drops $13B on a Data Centre in Alberta Farm Country
The biggest new neighbour in Sturgeon County isn't a feedlot or a grain terminal.
It's Mark Zuckerberg.
Meta announced it's building its first-ever Canadian data centre northeast of Edmonton, and the price tag is the kind of number that reshapes a rural county.
What happened. Meta will invest more than $13 billion in a massive AI data centre in Sturgeon County, the province confirmed July 8. It's a one-gigawatt facility to start, with room to scale to 1.8 GW down the road, the company's first big data centre build in Canada, dropped squarely in Alberta farm country.
Why it landed here. Cheap land, cold prairie air, and the real magnet, power. Alberta's deregulated grid and gas supply let a project like this get built fast. A new natural-gas plant, the Greenlight Electricity Centre, was just approved in the same county to help feed the beast, with power expected to flow around late 2030.
What it means for the farm gate.
💰 Real money hits the ground. The project is pegged at 3,000 construction jobs, 300 permanent jobs, and roughly $250 million a year in royalties, taxes, and fees flowing to Albertans. For a rural county, that's a tax base that funds roads and rec centres your grain cheque used to carry alone.
⚡ You're now bidding against a server farm for electrons. A gigawatt is a lot of demand — enough to power a mid-sized city — and it's being bolted onto the same grid that runs your grain dryer, your shop, and every irrigation pivot in the district. New gas generation is coming to cover it, but load like this is exactly what nudges long-run power and natural-gas demand (read: input costs) higher.
🚜 Land, water, and the "highest use" question. When a data centre can outbid a canola field for an acre and a water licence, the whole conversation about what prairie land is for gets louder. Handy backdrop: the board had a monster day Wednesday, with new-crop November canola settling at $783.70/t 📈, up $23.10 (+3.04%) on a ripping day for crude (+4.37% 📈) and soyoil (+3.34% 📈). The crop can still throw a punch, but it's now sharing the neighbourhood with the cloud.
🔧 Tractor Tech & Trends — A Used Combine Just Sold for $414,000
If you think new iron is pricey, wait until you see what the used stuff is fetching. Machinery Pete's latest roundup has June auctions printing record after record, and the headline number is a jaw-dropper.
🌾 The record: a 2024 John Deere S780 combine with just 476 hours sold for $414,000 at a Ritchie Bros. sale in Medford, Minn. on June 30 — the highest auction price on that model with 450-plus hours in more than two years.
📈 It's not a one-off. At a Schmid Auction the same day, a 2013 John Deere S670 pulled $103,500, the second-highest price of the year on that model, well above the ~$75,125 average. Even a 2008 Kubota M108X loader tractor hit $45,200, a new 12-year record.
🛠️ The So What? There's a hole in the used market where the five- to 12-year-old machines should be; nobody traded up during the lean years, so those combines were never built into the pipeline. That scarcity is why farmers are paying near-new money for low-hour used iron, and why "just buy a good used one" isn't the cheap fallback it used to be. Machinery Pete's blunt read: good used combines “jumped up in June."
🎬 The Grazing Pen — Hollywood Is Shooting a Western in the Coulees
Not every ag story is about markets — sometimes the back forty becomes a movie set.
🐴 The production: The Horseman, a western starring Kiefer Sutherland and Barry Pepper, is wrapping filming this week in rural Alberta — the crew's been working around the Drumheller Valley near Three Hills. ACTRA Alberta says cameras rolled from June 15 through a July 9 wrap, for a 2027 release.
🎥 The plot: it follows a grieving father (Pepper) and the colt he takes in as his only companion, set in the late 1800s; Sutherland plays a ruthless, pistol-quick aristocrat. Basically, a horse, a grudge, and a whole lot of Alberta scenery.
🍁 The So What? This isn't just celebrity gossip for the coffee row. More than 60% of movie and TV projects shot in Alberta film in rural communities, adding over $600 million to those towns since 2020. Ranches like the Scott family's 5,000-acre spread near Longview — the backdrop for Legends of the Fall and Shanghai Noon — turn horsemanship and pastureland into a genuine side hustle. Sometimes the best cash crop is a good-looking coulee and a rancher who can wrangle a film horse.
👉 Dig in
📊 Stat of the Day — $414,000
You could buy a house. Or you could buy a used combine.
$414,000 🚜 — what a 2024 John Deere S780 with 476 hours just sold for at auction.
That's a record for a high-hour example of that model in over two years, and it's second-hand.
When the used-iron market is so starved for good machines that a low-hour combine sells for the price of a starter home in most of the country, you know something's broken in the equipment pipeline. B
in space and land aren't the only things getting expensive out here; so is the machine that fills them.
What a used 2024 John Deere combine just sold for at auction.
👋 The Sign-off
That's the kernel for this Thursday.
Whether you're eyeballing your power bill next to a gigawatt data centre, quietly grateful you're not bidding $414K on a used combine, or just hoping the film crew leaves the gate closed on their way out, take the good with the strange.
We'll see you tomorrow. 🌅🍁
Stay sharp out there.
— The Daily Kernel