Minnesota Driftless-area dairy farm loses at appeals court in bid to add more cows

The state appeals court has ruled a Winona County board did not act unreasonably when denying an application from a longtime farm family seeking to exceed a county limit on the number of dairy cows the operation could keep on the premises.

Daley Farm of Lewiston had charged in court that some Winona County Board of Adjustment members were prejudiced against the locally known dairy farm, which had sought to triple its dairy operation to 6,000 animal units.

A year ago, a local judge dismissed the Daley case. On Monday, Judge Randall J. Slieter of the Minnesota Court of Appeals wrote for a three-judge panel that such a charge of bias was unfounded.

“There is nothing in this record to support Daley Farm’s claim that any member of the board of adjustment considered evidence outside of the record,” Slieter wrote.

The local courthouse battle had drawn attention from statewide farm groups for portending the future of regulations around large dairies and other concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, in an era of heightened scrutiny of sources of water pollution. A quarter-century ago, Winona County, in the heart of southeastern Minnesota dairy country and a porous karst geography especially vulnerable to groundwater pollution, imposed a 1,500-animal unit threshold on farms to better manage manure.

While the Daley Farm, which already exceeded this limit, was grandfathered in, court records reveal the family pursued the variance to grow the number of animals it raised and pass off the farm to the next generation.

In 2019, a district court ruled the board had improperly denied a variance request by Daley, citing bias by board members who had ties to outside groups, such as the Land Stewardship Project.

A reconstituted board heard the variance request again in 2021. Once again, the Daley request was denied. While the board unanimously agreed that seven of eight requirements to approve a variance to the county-wide cap on animal units had been met, they were split on whether economic reasons alone motivated the expansion plans.

Judge Slieter noted that a variance can be denied if the applicants seek it for “economic considerations alone.”

“The record supports the finding that the variance application was made for economic reasons alone,” Slieter wrote.

Southeastern Minnesota has constituted the front lines of an ongoing debate about how to manage hazardous nitrates, often produced by farm runoff, in sensitive geographies. In 2023, the EPA estimated nearly 10,000 people in the region had water supplies contaminated by high amounts of nitrates. Simultaneously, economic forces pressure farms to grow and compete with increasingly common mega-dairies to the west and south.

A number of state farm and environmental groups had intervened in the case, including associations for milk, beef, and pork producers, as well as the Minnesota Farm Bureau Federation.

Amelia Vohs, staff attorney for the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, cheered the ruling, saying the “Court of Appeals affirmed, once again, that Winona County has the right to determine how best to balance the economic interests of its growing agricultural sector with the community’s right to safe drinking water.”