Livestock, Feedlots, and CAFOs in Gentry County, Missouri

The Homan Farm case: what happened near Berlin

In the early 1990s, Premium Standard Farms (PSF), later a Smithfield Foods subsidiary operating through its ContiGroup Companies affiliate, purchased and leased roughly 4,300 acres near the small community of Berlin, in Gentry County, to build a hog "finishing farm" known as the Homan Farm -- a facility housing on the order of 80,000 hogs at a time and processing an estimated 200,000 hogs per year. Seven households living near the facility sued in 2002 over what they described as years of manure-odor nuisance tied to land application of liquid hog manure and large open wastewater lagoons. After nearly five weeks of trial testimony, a Kansas City jury returned a verdict on March 4, 2010, awarding $11.05 million in damages to 13 plaintiffs across the case -- roughly $1 million each to most of the affected households, covering eleven years of alleged nuisance. It stands as one of the largest jury verdicts against a hog operation in Missouri history.

We could not confirm the Homan Farm facility's current operating status from public sources during this research pass -- whether it remains an active hog-finishing operation today, has changed ownership or scale, or has been idled or closed, as happened to other former Premium Standard Farms sites elsewhere in Missouri in the years since Smithfield's 2023 closure of 35 hog farms in the state (those closures were reported in Putnam and Mercer counties, not Gentry, so they should not be assumed to apply here). If a specific parcel's proximity to this or any other confinement operation matters to your purchase decision, verify its current status directly with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources' CAFO permit program and the Gentry County Assessor rather than relying on the facility's history alone.

Why the county's own regulatory authority no longer matters as much as it did

In the years after cases like the Homan Farm verdict, some Missouri counties and county health departments tried to adopt local ordinances imposing stricter setbacks, air- and water-quality standards, or other conditions on CAFOs than state rules required, arguing the state constitution's 2014 right-to-farm amendment left room for county-level health regulation. The Missouri General Assembly closed that door in 2019 with Senate Bill 391, which prohibits county commissions and county health departments from adopting CAFO regulations stricter than state rules. Several counties (including Cedar County and Cooper County) challenged the law, arguing it stripped authority they'd held before; the Missouri Supreme Court upheld SB 391 in a 2023 ruling, settling the question in the state's favor.

The practical upshot for Gentry County specifically: unlike a zoning conditional-use hearing (which the county doesn't have anyway, since it has no zoning) or a local health ordinance (which the county can no longer use to impose CAFO-specific standards stricter than the state's), the real regulatory backstop for a new or expanding confinement operation here runs entirely through the Missouri Department of Natural Resources' CAFO permit program -- Class 1A, 1B, and 1C permits triggered at 7,000, 3,000, and 1,000 animal units respectively. If you're evaluating land near an existing operation, or considering starting one yourself, the state permit file (available through DNR's water-permit search tools) is the authoritative source on animal-unit limits, manure-management plan requirements, and any compliance history -- not a county ordinance.

For a buyer specifically concerned about nuisance risk near an existing or potential confinement operation, the 2010 verdict is a useful real-world data point about what courts have been willing to award in Missouri when a nuisance claim succeeds, but it's not a guarantee of a similar outcome today -- nuisance law turns heavily on specific facts (duration, severity, and whether the operation predates the plaintiff's own residence, among other factors), and the CAFO permit and enforcement landscape has shifted since 2010. Talk to a Missouri attorney experienced in agricultural nuisance and environmental law before assuming either that a nearby operation creates automatic liability exposure for its owner, or that you'd have an easy path to recourse as a neighboring landowner.