Why Manure’s Value is Still Hard to Prove

Every producer knows manure is worth something, but few can say exactly how much. Here’s a closer look at the gap between what farmers know and what they can prove.

Ask any livestock producer or custom manure applicator whether manure has value, and their face will likely say it all. Of course it does – few in this industry would argue it’s simply a waste product. What’s harder to get is a straight answer on just how much worth it holds, where it shows up, and who captures it.

Knowing manure is valuable and being able to prove and price it is a persistent and underexamined problem in agriculture, says Dustin Blunier, director of agronomy at PhycoTerra, who has spent the past several years studying manure management alongside a 20-year career in soil fertility and precision agriculture.

“The idea of manure holding value has never been foreign to producers,” Blunier says. “But there’s still a gap in how to define the value.”

And, he continues, it’s a gap worth exploring, because closing it stands to change how producers, handlers and landowners think about a resource that’s been sitting in plain sight for generations. U.S. livestock and poultry farms generate about 1.4 billion tons of manure every year – a resource of genuine scale that, in most cases, still isn’t being valued with any precision.

A legacy built on disposal

Manure contributes nutrients, organic matter and biological activity to the soil, making it an important component of many fertility programs. Its management has deep roots which, for most of modern agricultural history, have grown around the priority of simply getting rid of it.

“There has always been an innate understanding that it is both a natural fertility product, and waste that you had to get rid of,” Blunier says. “But thinking of manure as a by-product or a resource with value has always been difficult to fully quantify.”

For many years, the emphasis wasn’t necessarily on maximizing manure’s value. Instead, livestock operations focused on managing and dispersing a product that accumulated as part of normal production.

“From a livestock perspective, the priority has been on dispersal and getting rid of it as opposed to understanding, ‘How do I optimize using it?'” Blunier says.

That mindset still shapes behavior today. Decades of pushing manure just far enough from the barn to be out of the way left a literal record in the soil. “You can see that over 20 or even 50 years of application, the closer you get to the barn, the higher levels of minerals that would have come from that animal waste,” Blunier notes. It’s the physical footprint of a disposal mindset, not a fertility-management one.

That mindset is slowly changing, he says. As fertilizer costs increase and interest in soil health, nutrient stewardship and regenerative agriculture grows, producers are taking a closer look at the resources available on their own farms.

“There’s a better understanding that, with the right management, manure as a by-product of a livestock operation has real value.” But recognizing that ROI and being able to measure it with confidence are two very different things, and the industry is still catching up.

One resource, four sets of priorities

Blunier sees manure much more than just a source of N, P and K.

“Manure is an organic carbon source of fertility,” he says. “Not only does it act as a fertility source to that field, but it can also replenish soil organic matter. There’s a lot of extra benefit that comes to that if you look at the whole component of what manure does when it breaks down and fits into a crop management cycle.”

Part of what makes manure so hard to value is structural. On a modern operation, it’s rarely one person making every decision about it. “The land might be owned by somebody different than who’s actually farming it, who’s actually not a part of the livestock operation that’s producing the manure, which is then being handled by yet another contractor,” Blunier explains. Each of those parties is optimizing for something different – the landowner for long-term soil health, the farm operator for this year’s fertility return, the handler for efficiencies and speed.

“Nobody’s wrong,” he’s quick to add. “It’s just a matter of what their priority is.” And when several stakeholders are looking at the same product through different lenses, arriving at one agreed-upon value is difficult. He draws a comparison to using a bag of synthetic fertilizer, where the producer, the buyer, and the guaranteed analysis on the bag are all clearly defined. Manure rarely offers that same distinct value chain. It’s not always obvious whether the crop farmer is paying for manure, or whether the livestock producer is effectively paying someone to take it off their hands – and that ambiguity alone keeps a lot of value from ever being formally recognized.

Even without the stakeholder complexity, manure is simply a harder product to value on its own agronomic terms. A synthetic fertilizer “is basically delivering those nutrients very, very close to plant available,” Blunier says. Manure’s nutrients, by contrast, are tied to a carbon component – they must be broken down by soil and manure microbiology before crops can access them, a process that unfolds over time rather than a single application window.

That complexity is exactly why manure gets dismissed in some circles as a “poor man’s fertilizer,” seen as cheap or free precisely because it’s harder to fine-tune and predict. But the carbon component that makes manure harder to price is also where a lot of its extra value hides: it feeds soil biology, builds organic matter, and extends benefit well past the nutrient release. “There’s a lot of value components in it,” Blunier says, noting people can look at the same data and land in different places. “I can give you one opinion based on data and information, and somebody else can come in and give a different opinion. And neither of us would be wrong – we’re just interpreting it differently.”

The numbers back him up. University of Nebraska research shows the nutrient replacement value of feedlot manure can range from $0 to more than $25 per ton, depending on manure quality, water content, the receiving soil, and the crop grown – a spread wide enough to make a flat, universal price meaningless. Handling method alone moves the number substantially: recent extension work in 2026 pegs solid beef manure at roughly $18.78 per ton using book values and $24.06 per ton for a tested fresh beef sample, while liquid systems can be far higher on a nutrient-equivalent basis. By contrast, injected swine finisher manure is commonly valued in the $30–$45 per 1,000 gallons range in current university calculators when nitrogen fertilizer prices are high, reflecting the boost in plant-available N from injection. Neither figure shows up on a standard nutrient analysis – they reflect how the product is handled, not just what’s in it.

That’s the layer many fertility conversations don’t account for. How far manure must travel, how it’s stored, how consistent it is by the time it reaches the field all affect real cost, despite none of it appearing on a lab report. A 2020 manure use survey, organized by faculty from the University of Nebraska, University of Minnesota and Iowa State University, polled livestock operations on their top management challenges and found leading concerns centered on transportation and application costs. Producers and applicators aren’t struggling because they don’t understand nutrients. They are struggling because manure’s value is entangled with cost structures that traditional fertility conversations were never built to capture.

For livestock producers, an unquantified manure value is money left on the table, and it also weakens the case for investing more in handling and storage. Blunier puts it simply: it’s the difference between treating manure as “a waste product” versus “a by-product” – and that distinction changes behavior. “For it to be a by-product, you’ve got to understand what it is and put a little more care into it.” he says.

For custom applicators, an unclear value proposition makes it harder to price services fairly. Should it be by the acre or by the gallon? Does a more consistent, easier-handling product justify a different rate? These are the questions Blunier says the industry needs to work through directly.

And this all connects to some of the agriculture industry’s most pressing priorities: reducing reliance on synthetic inputs, building soil organic matter, and supporting regenerative and sustainable practices, and finding ways to protect family farms for generations to come. “It plays into regenerative ag, it plays into sustainability, and soil health,” Blunier says, “And, it’s a natural, renewable, ever-present resource.” And despite this, it remains one of the least formally valued inputs on most farms.

Where do we go from here?

Blunier offers a useful parallel on the crop side. A bushel of corn doesn’t earn a flat rate everywhere it goes – food grade, feed grade, and specialty markets pay differently because buyers understand exactly what they’re getting. He sees manure heading in a similar direction: a crop operation that understands what a given manure source delivers has a real basis to pay more for it, and a livestock operation that can demonstrate it is producing a better-managed product has a real basis to ask for a premium.

“I’m willing to give you more value for your product because now I understand what it’s doing,” he says, describing how that conversation could play out.

Closing this gap doesn’t start with a single silver-bullet product or practice. It starts with treating manure like the asset it is: testing it, tracking and measuring performance, and building benchmark data that turns a hunch into something a producer, a landowner, and an applicator can all agree on. Too much of the industry’s manure knowledge still lives in what Blunier calls “napkin pencil scratches” – informal, experience-built instincts that have never been converted into structured information anyone can point to and defend.

“We need to figure out the priorities within the industry,” he says, describing the thinking behind PhycoTerra’s Manure Value Initiative, an effort to identify every stage where manure’s value is created or lost, from handling and storage through application and crop response, and start putting real measurement behind each one. The goal isn’t a universal price tag for manure, but to give producers, applicators, and landowners a shared, defensible way to talk about what manure is really worth on their operation.

There is a lot of return waiting on the other side of that shift, but reaching it will require producers, applicators, and landowners to start asking harder questions, collecting better data, and treating manure value as something to be proven – not presumed.

To learn more about how PhycoTerra’s Manure Value Initiative is helping operations measure, benchmark and better understand manure’s role as a farm asset, visit phycoterra.com/2026-manure-value-initiative.

This article was written as part of a special content initiative in partnership with Amplify Content Studio and Manure Manager.