The Manitoba Livestock Manure Management Initiative was established to address environmental challenges related to the hog industry but its mandate was recently expanded to include all of the major livestock groups.

The initiative provides base funding, which is matched by industry and other funding agencies, to support manure related research.

Executive director Brandy Street notes manure management pertains to all livestock groups and the research needs of those groups often overlap.

“The type of research we fund varies from year to year depending on the priorities that are set by our stakeholders,” she said.

“How we do that is we typically gather ideas from our main stakeholder groups, those being groups from the agri-industry, government groups and academic,” Street explained. “Once we've gathered those ideas, we hold an annual strategic planning meeting at which representatives from these groups who sit on our board present the ideas and the board as a group is able to prioritize them and put them into a request for proposals that goes out to research groups in the industry and in academic areas so that they can address the priority issues that have been outlined.

“This year, our top priority has been focused on phosphorus management practices and technologies just because of the regulations that have been implemented by the Clean Environment Commission but that’s not to say that we aren’t looking into other areas.

“We're also looking at other nutrients, such as nitrogen management and odor management is always a contentious issue and of course feasibility and economics is important to Manitoba producers so it's important that any applications that come in are considering the economic feasibility of those technologies and practices.”

Street expects to see more research projects addressing the manure management needs of multiple livestock groups and more collaboration among those groups on projects in the future.