Slurry wizard

Our slurry wizard enables you to work out your slurry storage requirements and explore different storage scenarios to comply with regulations.

September 2024 update – important message for those with earth bank lagoons

A formula error has been identified in the October 2023 and March 2024 versions of Slurry Wizard. This will result in an underestimation of the working capacity of earth bank lagoons (due to the freeboard formula not accounting for the slope angle). The September Slurry Wizard update fixes the issue.

You may wish to review your previous calculations using the updated tool. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Slurry wizard: A tool to calculate the volume of slurry produced on farm

By entering basic farm information such as animal numbers, yard/roof areas that capture rainfall and housing periods, the wizard calculates the volume of slurry that the farm will produce on a monthly basis.

This data, together with the farm’s current slurry storage capacity, is used to calculate how long it takes to fill the available storage and whether more capacity is needed.

Note: the wizard will only function correctly if you have Microsoft Excel installed on your device.

What does the tool do?

Calculates the total amount of nitrogen produced to allow those farming within an NVZ to meet the obligation to stay beneath the required threshold
Helps you explore the potential impact and cost from changes to infrastructure such as redirecting rainwater, roofing dirty yards, increasing storage capacity or installing a slurry separator
Provides a cost/benefit analysis for fitting rainwater goods to redirect clean water and covering dirty yards
Allows you to understand the impact of changes by quantifying them, such as: increases in herd size, moving from straw yards to cubicles, introducing outside loafing areas, changes to the housing period and dirty water management

Recent changes to the wizard provide more accurate rainfall data. The tool now uses rainfall data from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology’s 1 km dataset. To access this data, the farm location needs to be identified with a 10-figure grid reference.

The wizard incorporates a calculation for pig wash water. A wider range of available bank slopes for earth-banked slurry stores and the ability to incorporate slurry bags have also been added.