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Sioux Falls officials and Smithfield Foods said the company will relocate its pork processing operation from its long-running downtown campus north of Falls Park to a new industrial park site in northwestern Sioux Falls, a shift announced Feb. 16 by Gov. Larry Rhoden, Mayor Paul TenHaken and Smithfield CEO Shane Smith. The move would allow Smithfield to begin vacating the current property and start a redevelopment process once the new facility is built.
Under the plan described at the announcement, Smithfield’s new location will sit farther from the Big Sioux River than the current plant, which sits directly on the waterway. The company said the new facility would also be “markedly less smelly,” attributing that expectation to air-scrubbing technology housed in a newly constructed plant.
The current Sioux Falls site opened as John Morrell & Co. in 1909 and was purchased by Smithfield Foods in 1995. The company said the Sioux Falls plant employs about 3,200 people, making it the third-largest employer in the city when public institutions are excluded, and officials described it as the company’s second-largest processing facility and the largest producer of packaged meats in the country.
Smithfield said the new facility will be larger, with an estimated $1.3 billion price tag on 200 acres. The company’s move also received support in part from a $50 million gift from billionaire Denny Sanford, a step city leaders said helps make the relocation possible while preserving the company’s long-term footprint in Sioux Falls.
City officials said they are preparing to finance parts of the transition through a $90 million tax increment financing district for the new campus. Smithfield told council members that the TIF would help fund a new wastewater treatment facility, and the company previously spent $45 million on a wastewater treatment facility at the current site about three years ago.
Environmental concerns have tracked Smithfield’s operations because the plant is part of a daily meatpacking process that generates air emissions and wastewater discharges. Officials noted that residents have long associated the downtown plant with a strong odor when wind conditions carry emissions across the area, and the company has pointed to the new plant’s planned air-scrubbing systems as a way to reduce that odor.
Smithfield uses an estimated 3 million gallons of water a day, according to Friends of the Big Sioux River. Under the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, the company must acquire permits for wastewater discharges and emissions through South Dakota’s Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources, and the company has faced compliance issues in the past, including DANR fines of $55,382 in 2018 tied to violations of a discharge permit related to a wastewater treatment failure and $44,000 in 2011 tied to numerous permit violations including ammonia release violations.
Ray Atkinson, Smithfield’s senior director of external communications, said in 2024 that the company’s prior $45 million wastewater investment led to a 47% decrease in nitrate discharge to the Big Sioux River. Atkinson said at the time that the investment was among the largest infrastructure projects with a direct impact on water quality in the Big Sioux River and that it reduced nutrient discharges and improved water quality in the river basin.
Sioux Falls city councilors received a briefing on the TIF proposal from the Planning and Development Department on Feb. 17. City staff planned to bring the proposal to the city planning commission on March 4, with hearings before city council later in the month, and Minnehaha County commissioners said the TIF was “absolutely necessary.”
Friends of the Big Sioux River, represented by Travis Entenman, said the relocation would not likely have a major impact on river quality. Entenman told News Watch that agricultural runoff upstream contributes to much of the harmful material carried to the river and said the move would function more like “a small drop in the bucket compared to everything that’s going into it,” while also describing the move as an unexpected development and saying the city’s eventual redevelopment could create new opportunities for public access and recreation near the river.
Beyond the local environmental and redevelopment questions, officials said Smithfield’s move has implications for the regional hog supply chain. Smithfield has said the plant works with more than 500 independent farmers in the region and has contract farms that provide hogs under exclusive agreements. Emma Davis, a representative for Smithfield, said in a statement to News Watch that most of the hogs processed in Sioux Falls come from independent producers in South Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa.
Smithfield’s economic role in South Dakota is also central to the planning discussions. The company said the Sioux Falls facility generated $4.4 million in taxes in 2024 and pays about $200 million in wages yearly, and officials said the plant employs more than 3,200 people locally. City leaders also described the company’s relocation decision as one that, if Smithfield had chosen to leave South Dakota entirely, could have meant multi-billion-dollar economic losses for the state.
TenHaken said in remarks Feb. 16 that Smithfield’s decision helped avoid a potential economic hit and cited the closure of a similarly sized Tyson beef processing plant in Nebraska that the University of Nebraska said cost that state $3.3 billion. In a separate part of the planning narrative, city and company leaders described the new campus as part of Foundation Park, an industrial area that already includes an Amazon distribution warehouse and FedEx and is also expected to include other production sites.
Atkinson and other officials did not frame the relocation as the end of environmental scrutiny. DANR did not respond to multiple requests for comment by the time of the story’s publication, and the move is expected to proceed through city planning processes and site redevelopment steps that TenHaken described as taking “several decades,” including demolition and assessment work at the downtown site before the property can be redeveloped.