Crop and Livestock Economics

What is Manure Worth?

Written by: Bob Koehler, SWROC and Bill Lazarus - Department of Applied Economics

MANURWKST.XLS, a downloadable spreadsheet (1.05 MB) may be used to determine whether manure will make a positive cash flow contribution to a livestock/farming operation, or whether it will result in a net cost to the livestock operation. This knowledge will be useful in budgeting new facilities. It should be especially relevant in contract production situations where the outcome can be a significant contributor to cash flow projections. The calculations can also assist crop and livestock producers attempting to fix values on manure that may be transferred or sold from one entity to another. It allows the user to analyze either liquid or solid manure. Comment boxes as well as the "Directions" sheet provide information for using the worksheet. For more information read Determining Manure Value, a paper on the basics of manure value determination written by Bob Koehler and Bill Lazarus. The default data in MANURWKST.XLS is for swine manure. See also MANURWKST_DAIRY.XLS, which is the same MANURWKST.XLS spreadsheet but with dairy manure as the default.

Read the news release about this software.

MANURCST.XLS, a downloadable spreadsheet (350 KB) may be used by livestock producers or custom manure applicators to estimate the cost of distributing manure on land. It allows the user to enter farm specific information such as the equipment being used, the distance to land receiving the manure, and market prices. The program then computes the cost and time required to distribute manure on the land. It is intended to be a companion program for the "What's Manure Worth?" manurwkst.xls spreadsheet.

** Disclaimer: This software is provided "as is." The entire risk as to quality and performance of the software is with the user.

** NOTE: When the file dialog box appears, save the program to your harddrive before utilizing the spreadsheet.

** These spreadsheets contain macros. Your Excel macro security setting must be set to "enable macros" in Excel 2007 version, or "medium" or "low" in earlier version for them to work properly.

More manure economics and swine material available on Bob Koehler's webpage.