Agricultural Runoff Management

Keeping manure on your land reduces your fertilizer costs and helps protect water quality. Manage your manure spreading to prevent manure runoff events when it rains or when snow melts. Avoid spreading altogether when precipitation is forecast or imminent or when the ground is frozen.

DNR revised manure management rules for the state's largest farms as one effort to reduce manure-related problems that can contaminate wells, kill fish and pollute lakes and rivers.   Learn more about revisions to rules for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs)

Across Wisconsin, farmers face the challenge of making a living from the land, while protecting our natural resources through environmentally-sound farming practices. Rising equipment costs, decreasing product prices, urban sprawl, and tighter environmental regulations all must be balanced for a farm to be successful. DNR Agricultural Runoff Management Staff are dedicated to helping Wisconsin's agricultural community maintain farm viability while protecting Wisconsin's water resources.

• The Department has codified statewide performance standards that apply to agricultural operations of various types and sizes. These performance standards include:
  • manure management prohibitions
  • nutrient management
  • manure storage
  • soil loss from riparian fields
  Implementation of the standards and prohibitions occurs primarily through the counties, although the Department will be the main implementation authority for permitted facilities.
  
  For further details see:
  • Runoff Management Administrative Rules page
  • Implementation Strategy for NR 151 - Agricultural Nonpoint Performance Standards and Prohibitions.
  • Manure Management Task Force [exit DNR]
  
  
• Best Management Practices - RoboCow [Flash presentation, exit DNR]

  It's a bird. It's a plane. No, it's RoboCow. Able to leap tall silos in a single bound, this animated environmental advocate uses her ground-scan radar vision to detect on-farm perils. Like the best of all super heroes, she maps out solutions to hazards like improperly stored chemicals, pesticide run off and stream contamination. Once her mission is successfully accomplished, she flies off to seek other pastures in need of greening. This Flash animation, conceived to make students from grades six to 10 aware of best farm management practices, won an award of merit from the Association for Media and Technology in Education in Canada based in Etobicoke, ON.

• Farm Policy, Pollution and the Mississippi River [exit DNR] - Explanation of the Federal Farm Bill.