The cost of manure management and environmental protection are difficult to assess and when considering profit maximizing farms, there are no advantages in investing in costly practices to reduce the impact of manure on the environment. Environmental regulations are also considered as measures that reduce the companies’ competitive advantages and could eventually costs jobs. In assessing new ways or technologies that could help solving the environmental impact of manure tools have to be developed and used to make thorough investigations of the situation and final economical analysis that could lead to choices of management practices or techniques. All the steps of manure management have to be investigated from production , handling and processing through manure utilization and all the on-farm costs and benefits have to be considered. Different methods of analysis or tools have to be developed and used in order to help in the choice of manure management practices and those methods are: cost/benefit analysis, mathematical programming and expert systems. Work has to be done to all cost estimates related to different manure management practices usual ones as well a newly developed ones. All this information has to be put together in user-friendly tools in order to help the producers in their manure system choices.

This publication present different analysis methods that have been developed in some areas such as dairy farming and also livestock in general. In order to keep accurate tools, there is an important need for data updates for those analysis systems or computer aids.