Ultimately, this is an agreement between two consenting adults. A starting place for negotiation is the dollar value of the commercial fertilizer that is being replaced by the manure. This value should be adjusted for other important factors. These include actual nutrients delivered, uniformity or lack of uniformity of application, availability of the nutrients, cost of transport and application, soil amendment value, potential compaction, etc. Likewise, other factors come into play. For example, if there is limited land available for manure application, the crop farmer is in a stronger bargaining position. If there are a lot of crop farmers looking for manure, the livestock farmer is in a better position.
