What's changing in slurry rules

Storage minimums

4 months is the SSAFO baseline and it applies to every farm in England, not just those outside a Nitrate Vulnerable Zone. NVZ rules then sit on top: inside an NVZ you need 5 months (cattle, sheep, goats, deer, horses) or 6 months (pigs and poultry).

The Environment Agency recommends 6 months across the board to stay clear of the Farming Rules for Water — it restated that in July 2026. Note: the "6 cattle / 8 pigs" figure you'll hear is the grant target you build to, not the legal minimum.

Farming Rules for Water

You must spread to the crop and soil's need, not because the store is full. The Environment Agency treats "spreading because you've run out of storage" as a breach. The statutory guidance updated on 18 June 2025 is the current version and remains in effect — nothing has changed since.

Worth knowing why it changed: the Office for Environmental Protection found that Defra's earlier 2022 guidance failed to comply with environmental law. The June 2025 rewrite fixed it, and the OEP closed its investigation in October 2025. The practical upshot is that following the guidance no longer buys you the protection from enforcement it once did — the crop-need test at the time of application is what counts.

NVZ closed periods are running now

If you're in an NVZ, the closed period for high readily-available-nitrogen organic manures — slurry included — has already started on sandy and shallow soils: 1 August on tillage land, 1 September on grassland. The rest follows shortly — 1 October on other tillage land and 15 October on other grassland, both running to 31 January. If you have slurry to shift, that's the window closing. Check which soil you're on before the next load goes out, and use the spreading checker if you're not sure.

Drought: no easement on spreading

Worth saying plainly, because assumptions are being made. Defra's dry weather and drought guidance of 12 August 2026 offers some flexibility on land management scheme agreements — but it contains no easement on slurry spreading, manure rules or the Farming Rules for Water. A dry summer doesn't change what you can put on, or when.

Still dry. The Environment Agency's report for the week to 10 September 2026 has ten areas in drought — East Anglia, Herts and North London, Thames, Devon and Cornwall, the West Midlands, Wessex, Kent and South London, Solent and South Downs, the East Midlands, and Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire — with four more in prolonged dry weather. England had 33% of average rainfall in the first part of September. The EA's line to farmers is to assess ground and weather conditions before spreading organic manures, slurries included. Hard, cracked ground moves slurry to a watercourse as readily as saturated ground does.

SSAFO guidance: new online notification form

The GOV.UK guidance was updated on 26 January 2026 to add an online Environment Agency notification form for storage construction plans. That is the only part that's new — you must still notify the EA at least 14 days before building or substantially altering a store.

The other things often lumped in with it are long-standing, not recent: MANNER-NPK replaced PLANET for nutrient planning back in 2018, the +25% rainfall allowance dates from 2018, and the soil-permeability standard from 2017. The separator guidance (2023) is worth re-reading though — your storage capacity must be met without relying on a separator.

Covers on permitted pig & poultry units

Permitted intensive units must cover slurry stores under environmental permitting. The old exemption for slurry below 1% dry matter was withdrawn in August 2020 — so it now applies to those stores too.

22-week storage

All slurry farms need 22 weeks' storage (housed cattle) or 26 weeks' (housed pigs). The date matters because it's when the last exemptions ran out: farms outside NVZs, and stores built before September 1991 that were previously exempt, all had until 1 January 2026 to comply. Everyone is now on the same footing.

One change of name to be aware of: since 1 November 2025 these sit under the Environmental Authorisations (Scotland) Regulations rather than CAR. The rules carried across largely unchanged, but SEPA now calls them EASR general binding rules.

Storage: 5 months cattle, 6 months pigs and poultry

Now confirmed, so here it is in full. The Water Resources (Control of Agricultural Pollution) (Wales) Regulations 2021 require storage for the whole storage period: 1 October to 1 March (5 months) for cattle and other livestock, and 1 October to 1 April (6 months) for pigs and poultry. Capacity must allow for rainwater and dirty water entering the system, with an extra week's contingency where you're spreading on low run-off-risk land.

The phase-in is finished — storage capacity was the last duty to land, on 1 August 2024. All the rest (nutrient management plans, risk maps, records, closed periods, the 170 kg N/ha whole-farm limit) is fully in force.

Storage: 22 weeks, or 26 with pigs or poultry

Also now confirmed. Under the Nutrients Action Programme Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2019, holdings need at least 22 weeks' livestock manure storage — rising to 26 weeks on any holding with a pig or poultry enterprise. Small units (under 10 breeding sow places, 150 finishing pig places or 500 poultry places) stay on 22 weeks.

Closed periods: chemical fertiliser 15 September – 31 January; slurry 15 October – 31 January; farmyard manure 31 October – 31 January. In February, buffer zones widen to 30 m from lakes and 15 m from other waterways, with a 30 m³/ha application ceiling.

Capital Grants 2026 — closed

The round opened on 30 July 2026 with £225 million and closed on 1 September 2026 after around 17,000 applications. It went at a pace nobody quite expected: 25% of the budget allocated on day one, 50% within 24 hours, 75% by 1 August. Slurry-relevant items included covers for slurry and digestate stores, automatic scrapers, above- and below-ground tanks, yard drainage and lined biobeds, capped at £25,000 each for water quality, air quality and flood management.

The RPA is assessing applications and has said offers are likely to keep going out through the rest of the year. No opening date has been announced for a 2027 round. The reformed SFI's second window — open to everyone — opened on 22 September 2026 and closed at 15:48 the same day, once the applications received covered the full Window 2 budget. Defra says the next opportunity to apply for the SFI will be in 2027. That leaves no open England scheme paying for slurry storage or environmental actions as things stand. See the grants guide.

Splash plates finished — the last exemption ends

Worth being precise about this one, because it's usually reported wrong. High-trajectory splash plates, swivel plates and rain guns have been banned outright since 1 January 2023 — for everyone, no exceptions. What ends on 1 January 2027 is the transitional permission for smaller farms to keep using an inverted, downward-facing splash plate.

That transition never covered contractors, farms with more than 100 milking cows or 200 beef livestock units, or pig units above 800 fattening pigs or sows — they've had to use precision equipment all along. From January 2027 everyone is on a dribble bar or band spreader, trailing hose, trailing shoe or direct injection. An umbilical system does not count on its own — it delivers the slurry to the field and still has to end in one of those applicators. The date is re-enacted in the 2025 rewrite and shows no sign of slipping. No exemption for steep or inaccessible land has been published — if you think you need one, ask SEPA rather than assume.

NAP 2027–2030 — consultation closed, decision to come

DAERA's consultation on the next Nutrients Action Programme ran from 29 June to 7 September 2026 and is now closed. Responses are being analysed; the intention is to have the programme in place for the start of 2027. An earlier 2026–2029 version was consulted on in 2025 and never made law after opposition, so this is the second attempt.

What was proposed, so you can see what may be coming: replacing the 250 kg N/ha derogation with a two-tier Nutrient Stewardship Programme; a 30% cut in the national phosphorus surplus over four years; low-emission slurry spreading equipment made mandatory by farm size — over 100 livestock units by 2028, over 75 by 2029, over 50 by 2030; a single application limit cut from 30 to 25 m³/ha in February and between 30 September and 15 October; and tighter rules on urea, with unprotected granular urea allowed only from 1 February to 31 March. These are consultation proposals, not law — nothing here changes until the new NAP is made.

Behind it: the Office for Environmental Protection concluded in April 2026 that the NAP rules need to be significantly strengthened and better implemented, and DAERA accepted twelve of its recommendations in July.

One rulebook instead of four

Defra has committed three times over to consolidating SSAFO, the Farming Rules for Water and NVZ rules into a single set of national standards — in the water white paper of January 2026, the "farming rules shake-up" announcement of 27 January 2026, and the Farming Roadmap 2050 published on 24 June 2026. The white paper also floats extending environmental permitting to cattle farms, and commits to raising farm inspections to 6,000 a year by 2029.

The likely vehicle is the Clean Water Bill, announced in the King's Speech on 13 May 2026, whose briefing notes promise tools for "consolidating and strengthening agricultural pollution rules". The Bill had still not been introduced as at 13 September 2026, and no consultation on the consolidation itself has been published. So: a firm commitment, three times stated, with no mechanism and no date. Storage capacity is in scope, and the direction points to more farms needing compliant storage, not fewer.

The Farming Rules for Water post-implementation review

When the Office for Environmental Protection closed its investigation in October 2025, it left Defra with one outstanding recommendation: publish the overdue post-implementation review of the Farming Rules for Water as soon as possible. We can't confirm it has been published. It's the document most likely to signal how the spreading rules get enforced next, so it's worth watching.

Covers on all slurry stores

Time for an honest update on this one. The Clean Air Strategy proposed covering all slurry and digestate stores by 2027. That date is now next year and there is still no law, no consultation and no implementation date — the government's own environmental progress reporting treats covers as a grant-funded, voluntary matter rather than a coming requirement.

It hasn't been formally dropped either. Read it as a stated aspiration that has quietly stalled, most likely to reappear folded into the wider consolidation. Building any new store covered or cover-ready remains the safe bet — though with Capital Grants 2026 closed there is no open England scheme paying for a cover at the moment.

Wales intends to drop fixed closed periods — but not yet

Following the statutory review of the Welsh regulations published in March 2025 — 23 recommendations, all accepted — the intention is to move away from fixed calendar closed periods toward a risk-based approach that takes account of weather, soil conditions and crop need. The Cabinet Minister for Rural Resilience and Sustainability, Llyr Gruffydd, has committed to removing the closed period, and a Welsh Government task and finish group has been working through the review recommendations, meeting in July and due again in September 2026.

No amending regulations have been laid, and nothing changes this autumn. NFU Cymru has confirmed there will be no change in time for 2026–27; the FUW is pushing for the law to change before the 2027 closed period. Until regulations are laid, the existing closed periods and every other duty stand exactly as they are — grassland from 15 October. Timing is not announced. Don't plan this autumn, or next, around a change that hasn't been made.

Grants get consolidated

The Farming Roadmap 2050 commits to launching a consolidated capital grants offer in the 2027–2029 window, promising more stability than the current stop-start rounds. No amounts, no opening date, and — worth noting — no dedicated slurry grant is named. There's also been no announcement of a further Slurry Infrastructure Grant round.