For farmers, slurry can be both a blessing and a curse: in the right place at the right time, it’s a valuable source of fertilizing nutrients; in the wrong place at the wrong time, it’s a dangerous and heavily-regulated potential pollutant.

A number of decision support tools–such as RB209, Crap App and Planet–have been produced with the aim of helping farmers ensure their slurry and manure is a blessing, rather than a curse.

But how useful are these tools to farmers in the field? How can they be made better?

SLURRY-MAX is an interdisciplinary project led by Claire Waterton at Lancaster Unversity. Claire, alongside her colleagues Lisa Norton (Lancaster), Katrina Macintosh (Queen’s Belfast), Ruben Sakrabani (Cranfield), James Gibbons and Dave Chadwick (Bangor), Shailesh Shrestha (SRUC) and Emma Cardwell (Lancaster), working alongside ADAS and AHDB, will investigate what decision support tools actually do for farmers, and how they can be made to do more.