Buying Land in Bon Homme County, South Dakota

A real zoning ordinance, with a live wind-energy setback fight

Bon Homme County has administered a zoning ordinance since it was originally adopted on April 13, 1999, with documented amendments in 2003 and 2015, and further amendment proposals debated as recently as 2017. That's a genuinely maintained code, overseen by the county's Planning and Zoning Board out of the courthouse in Tyndall -- not a static ordinance adopted once and forgotten.

What's specifically worth knowing is the ordinance's wind-energy setback, which sets turbines back roughly 500 feet from a residence, business, or public building -- a notably short distance compared to some neighboring jurisdictions' rules. In November 2017, the county commission held a public hearing on a proposed amendment that would have pushed that setback out to 2 miles; the amendment was voted down 3-1, with the commission keeping the 500-foot standard. That's not an abstract policy debate -- it played out against the real backdrop of Prevailing Wind Park, a 219.6-megawatt wind energy facility permitted at the state level through the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission (Docket EL18-026), with Bon Homme County issuing its own Large Wind Energy System Permit on August 21, 2018. See our dedicated wind-leasing page below for the project's real scale, how landowner leases worked, and what to check near an operating turbine.

The same zoning ordinance also addresses animal feeding operations. A 2017 hog-operation approval in the county's north end touched off a genuinely contested fight over whether to add a new mid-size animal-unit classification -- our dedicated feedlot-siting page below covers what happened and what it means for a parcel near an existing or proposed operation today.

The Missouri River, Lewis & Clark Lake, and a diversified rural economy

Bon Homme County sits along the Missouri River in southeast South Dakota -- the county's name itself comes from a 2,000-acre island in the river that Lewis and Clark named in 1804. Gavins Point Dam, completed in 1957, backs up the Missouri here to form Lewis & Clark Lake, and the Springfield Recreation Area on the lake's upper end draws boating, fishing, and camping traffic. That mix of river-valley terrain and rolling agricultural land gives Bon Homme County a more diversified rural economy than a purely inland farming county -- agriculture remains the core (with a countywide agricultural GDP contribution in the neighborhood of $148 million and several hundred direct farm jobs, per available county-level economic data), but lake-recreation tourism and, as covered above, wind-energy development are both real, additional pieces of the local land-use picture.

With a 2020 census population of 7,003 across roughly 564 square miles of land, Bon Homme County is mid-sized by rural South Dakota standards -- large enough to support a maintained zoning ordinance and an active Planning and Zoning Board, but still a county where confirming details directly with courthouse staff in Tyndall is the reliable way to get current, parcel-specific answers.