SHELDON, Iowa – The Sheldon Fire Co. was called to the southwest part of Sheldon around 5 a.m. Sept. 21, following a report of an explosion that occurred at the nearby Kent Feeds mill.

Upon arrival, firefighters met with Kent Feeds employees on site and could see visible damage to the east side of the tower in the north part of the facility, said Sheldon Fire Co. Chief Brad Hindt in a news release obtained by Farm World. Employees and firefighters then shut down the utilities to that part of the facility. 

“We really didn’t see anything visible at first,” Hindt told KTIV in Sioux City, Iowa. “We located the employees that were on site, and they pointed us in the right direction. From a distance, we were able to see that the side of the tower on the north side of the facility had been blown out, heavily damaged.”

Then Sheldon Fire Co. requested O’Brien County Emergency Management to respond to the scene with their drone to check for any hot spots in that area of the facility: “Once on scene, the drone was deployed to check hotspots, and for the extent of damage, nothing of concern was found in the facility,” Hindt said in the news release.

The cause of the incident appeared to be accidental in nature as employees stated that they were in the process of starting up the grain dryer for daily operations when the explosion happened, Hindt said: 

Firefighters were finished at the scene at around 6 a.m., with no injuries reported by the Sheldon Fire Co.

According to N’West Iowa REVIEW, based in Sheldon, the Sept. 21 explosion at Kent Feeds, formerly known as Deluxe Feeds, was not the first at the facility. In July 2019, an explosion left a large hole in the side of one of its buildings. Five people were inside the building at the time, but no one was injured.

At the time of that explosion, Deluxe Feeds was in the middle of a $37 million expansion to the Sheldon facility. Five pellet mills, two processing lines, high-efficiency packaging equipment, robotic pelletizers, grain cleaning, and packing innovations, and a 50,000-square-foot warehouse were added, N’West Iowa REVIEW reported. Kent Nutrition Group, a major animal nutrition and feed manufacturer, acquired Deluxe Feeds in October 2016.

In December 2022, the Sheldon Fire Co. had another incident to report at the Kent Feeds mill where a fire started in a feed pellet machine in the feed mill area of the plant, the newspaper reported. The damage was confined to one feed pellet machine, the exhaust system and several pallets of paper.

In November 2025, there was another fire at the plant where firefighters found a cooler on the second floor that was hot and smoldering.