Updates from the Manure Recycling and Innovative Products Task Force Meeting: Progress and Pressures On Display

When the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s Manure Recycling and Innovative Products (MRIP) Task Force met last month, the discussion underscored a growing reality for California dairies: manure management is becoming more urgent, more complex, and more central to the state’s climate and water quality goals.

CDFA first convened MRIP in October 2021 in coordination with scientists, technical experts, and dairy industry representatives to develop recommendations on how California could better capture the value of dairy manure to support healthy soils, protect water quality, and reduce agriculture’s climate footprint. The task force released a report in December 2022 with several policy recommendations broken down into four categories: conventional strategies, composting, denitrification and treatment, and nitrogen capture. Since then, the Task Force has continued to reconvene periodically to share updates, track progress, and identify remaining barriers.

Practices funded by the Alternative Manure Management Program (AMMP) are core parts of the discussion in MRIP, especially composting, advanced manure separation systems, and vermifiltration. The latter two practices were originally piloted as part of the Dairy Plus Program before becoming eligible for AMMP in recent solicitations. 

MRIP is playing an important role in advancing some of the recommendations in CalCAN’s recent AMMP report, including expanding dialogue between dairy industry stakeholders and state agencies on the challenges dairies are facing and the multiple benefits of and remaining barriers to AMMP practices.

At the meeting this March, Secretary Karen Ross and other speakers pointed to the collision of several major pressures on dairies: increasing input costs, emerging new water quality requirements, challenges managing surplus manure nitrogen, and new restraints on water and land use from the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. Secretary Ross framed this as a perfect challenge for MRIP to help address by continuing to discuss pathways to turn dairy manure from a disposal challenge into a source of useful products, environmental benefits, and economic opportunity. 

Update on CDFA’s Dairy Plus program

The MRIP meeting provided an updated picture of the Programa Dairy Plus, which provides additional funding to AMMP and Dairy Digester Research and Development Program (DDRDP) projects to adopt advanced manure management systems intended to reduce methane while also improving nitrogen and salt management. CDFA’s Roberta Franco reported that Dairy Plus has funded 37 projects so far, including 18 vermifiltration systems, 14 advanced solid-liquid separation systems using flocculants and/or beads, and five weeping wall projects with aerobic composting. She also said CDFA expects to release another solicitation around June, with roughly $32 million still available for awards.

Representatives from companies that make technologies eligible under two of the main Dairy Plus Program practice categories gave overviews of their technologies. BioFiltro explained how their patented vermifiltration systems use earthworms and microorganisms to treat dairy wastewater. Figure 8 Environmental presented their advanced solid-liquid separation, which uses coagulants and flocculants to remove solids and nutrients from dairy waste streams.

The California Dairy Research Foundation highlighted the ongoing UC–led, third-party evaluation of Dairy Plus-funded systems. Executive Director Denise Mullinax said the goal is to assess whether these technologies deliver the expected improvement on California dairies for methane reductions and water quality. Other participants also emphasized that independent verification will be important as public funding supports wider deployment of these systems. 

 Water Board Updates on the 2024 Draft Dairy Order 

The meeting also featured a State Water Board update on the State Water Board’s ongoing process to revise and finalize the October 2024 Draft Dairy Order, which proposes significant new requirements for dairies to reduce nitrate leaching to groundwater. The draft order would establish a new regulatory framework for nitrogen discharges that includes interim and final numeric land application rates, phased compliance schedules, and whole-farm nitrogen accounting. It would also require dairies to report nitrogen applied minus nitrogen removed to track whether manure applications exceed what crops can use. In practice, the draft order points toward a future in which dairies with excess nitrogen will need to export, treat, or otherwise manage more manure off-site rather than continue overapplying it to cropland.

The State Water Board presentation noted that the Draft Order recognizes the need for technological and market development to move dairy waste into off-site uses such as fertilizer and soil amendments, but didn’t offer any proposals or plans for how to accelerate those developments to enable dairies to comply with the forthcoming Dairy Order. The State Water Board representative informed MRIP that the Board expects to release the next iteration of the Dairy Order for public comment in the first half of 2026 and then finalize and adopt the Order by the end of 2026. 

One important implication is that the draft order could increase demand for practices that make manure easier to dry, stabilize, and move off-dairy, especially composting and other alternative manure management systems.

Preliminary “Manureshed” Analysis from Sustainable Conservation Shows Significant Economic Opportunity for “Circular Economy” Between Dairies and Nearby Farms

Sustainable Conservation’s Sarah Castle presented preliminary findings from a “manureshed” analysis of the San Joaquin Valley. The basic questions guiding the analysis are: Where are dairy nutrient surpluses concentrated? Where is nearby crop demand? And what kinds of manure products could realistically connect those sources and sinks?

Her early findings suggested there may be more nearby demand for manure-based nutrients than previously estimated. In some areas, orchards such as almonds appear to represent a significant potential market. Overall, Castle estimated the economic value of manure replacement for imported synthetic nitrogen fertilizer in the San Joaquin Valley could approximate $111 million per year.

But the discussion also made clear that this does not automatically translate into easy adoption. Castle’s presentation highlighted a more in-depth analysis of two different counties in the San Joaquin Valley to emphasize that different crops may need different products and have different considerations. For example,growers need confidence in nutrient content, handling, food safety, and salt levels. And if SGMA reduces the amount of actively farmed land near dairies, that will make the available market for manure products smaller.  

Composting has long been seen as one of the most promising pathways for turning manure into a more transportable, higher-value product. Sustainable Conservation’s 2017 report found that dairy manure composting has strong potential to reduce water quality impacts, improve soils, and lower greenhouse gas emissions, but faces regulatory and market barriers. MRIP’s 2022 Final Report also recognized these barriers and made policy recommendations, but this latest meeting showed that progress on those recommendations has been limited. 

Next Steps for the MRIP Taskforce

The discussion portion of the MRIP meeting identified that the challenge ahead is making sure that the recent progress in research and pilot projects translates into practical, scalable pathways for dairies across the state. 

One MRIP member emphasized the need for better “matchmaking” between dairies and technologies, so producers have the support they need to identify the practices and technologies that best fit their operations rather than chasing whichever solution is most visible or most recently promoted. Others stressed that smaller and mid-sized dairies need affordable and feasible options too, and that the increasing complexity of manure regulation and compliance can create disproportionate burdens for those operations.

Overall, the meeting made clear that manure management can no longer be treated as a siloed issue. Instead, manure management sits at the intersection of climate, water quality, healthy soils, and farm viability goals and mandates that are overseen by several different agencies. 

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