Livestock Feedlots and CAFOs in Nobles County, Minnesota

Licensing starts at 10 animal units, with a separate state permit tier at 300

Under Nobles County's feedlot ordinance, a county feedlot license is required for any existing or new feedlot exceeding 10 animal units that does not present a potential pollution hazard, provided the operator applies and meets the ordinance's minimum standards along with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency's own Chapter 7020 feedlot rules. That 10-animal-unit threshold is a low bar -- it captures far more than a large commercial operation, and a buyer planning even a modest livestock operation on agricultural land here should check whether the planned herd size crosses it before assuming no county-level licensing applies.

A separate, additional requirement kicks in at a higher scale: any operator constructing or expanding a feedlot to between 300 and 999 animal units must apply for a Construction Short Form (CSF) permit, a distinct MPCA-tied permit tier layered on top of the county's own license. This means the county license alone does not cover every operation -- crossing the 300-animal-unit line during construction or an expansion adds a separate permitting step, and confirming which tier a specific project falls into should happen before site work begins, not after.

Setbacks run from road centerlines, and scale sharply near county parks

Nobles County's feedlot ordinance sets specific separation distances in Table 1 of the ordinance, measured from road centerlines rather than road edges or right-of-way lines: 275 feet from the centerline of a township road, and 300 feet from the centerline of a county or state road. An exception applies to a farmstead that existed before 1997, which is not held to these same road setbacks -- a genuinely useful fact for a buyer evaluating an older, established farm site versus raw land where a new feedlot would need to meet the current standard from scratch.

A more recent addition to the ordinance sets setbacks specifically from county parks, scaled by herd size rather than a flat number: a feedlot up to 1,999 animal units must sit at least three-eighths of a mile (1,980 feet) from a county park, while a feedlot of 2,000 animal units or more must sit a full mile away. That's a meaningfully larger buffer for a genuinely large operation, and it means land near one of Nobles County's parks may face a real siting constraint for a large-scale feedlot even where road setbacks alone would otherwise be satisfied. The ordinance also specifies that none of these setbacks apply to an applicant's own residence, to any residence located on the farm where the feedlot sits, or to a residence owned by a family member of the applicant or feedlot owner -- worth knowing if a family farm's existing house sits closer to a planned facility than the general setback would otherwise allow.

What to confirm before buying land to site or expand a feedlot here

Before treating a specific Nobles County parcel as feedlot-ready, calculate the planned animal-unit count first -- it determines whether a county license alone suffices, whether a Construction Short Form permit is also required, and which road and county-park setback distances actually apply. Confirm the parcel's distance to the nearest township, county, or state road centerline and to any county park boundary directly with Environmental Services rather than estimating from a plat map, and ask specifically whether an existing farmstead on the property predates 1997, since that changes which road-setback standard applies. On top of the county's own license and any CSF permit, confirm with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency what state-level feedlot permit tier the planned operation's size triggers under Chapter 7020 -- the county ordinance is a local land-use layer on top of that state framework, not a replacement for it.