PTO vs Engine-Driven Manure Pumps: How to Size One
For most farms running their own manure with existing tractors in the 200 to 300+ horsepower range, Hoover Ag’s PTO pump covers the job.
If you haul or broker manure commercially in Pennsylvania, you need a certification, you need to maintain it with continuing education, and you need to keep records that prove you’re doing the work within the rules. None of that is optional. All of it is manageable if you know what’s actually required.
The framework exists because Pennsylvania takes water quality seriously, and because commercial hauling and application move a lot of nutrients around the landscape. Getting the rules right protects the water, protects your operation from complaints and enforcement actions, and protects the credibility of the industry as a whole.
Here’s what the rules actually say, plainly, with the sources cited so you can go deeper on anything specific to your operation.
Pennsylvania’s Commercial Manure Hauler and Broker Certification Act (commonly called Act 49) requires certification for anyone hauling or brokering manure on a commercial basis. That means:
If you’re a farm operator moving manure between your own fields with your own equipment, Act 49 doesn’t apply to you. If you’re taking money to move manure for someone else, it does.
The certification isn’t a suggestion. Enforcement is real, and hiring an uncertified hauler puts the farm on the receiving end of the arrangement in a bad position too. The specific requirements sit under 7 Pa. Code Chapter 130E.
Certification requires completing a course and passing an exam that covers three main areas:
Transport and land application. The mechanical side of the work. Safe hauling, spill prevention, road safety, calibrated application, avoiding overflows, staying within setbacks.
Nutrient management planning. How to read and implement a nutrient management plan or nutrient balance sheet. What the rates mean, where the field boundaries are, what the restrictions on a specific site look like on paper.
Recordkeeping. What has to be documented, in what format, and how long you have to keep it.
Courses are offered at locations around the state throughout the year. Penn State Extension coordinates the Pennsylvania Manure Hauler and Broker Program, which is the primary channel for finding a certification course near you.
Once you pass the exam, you’re certified. But certification isn’t permanent.
Through continuing education credits. Two categories of credits show up most often for commercial haulers and brokers.
Act 49 credits are specific to the Commercial Manure Hauler and Broker Certification and cover topics directly relevant to hauling and application work.
Act 38 credits come from the Nutrient Management Act framework and cover nutrient management planning topics. Act 38 credits often overlap with what haulers need to know because so much of the work is done under a farm’s Act 38 or Manure Management Plan.
Credits are typically available at industry events throughout the year. Two of the main venues:
Sessions typically cover setback determination, spill response, road safety for agricultural equipment, manure spreader calibration, and updates on any recent regulatory changes.
Pennsylvania has centralized much of its farm compliance infrastructure into an online platform called PAOneStop. If you’re building or working from a manure management plan or nutrient management plan, this is the tool the state expects you to be using.
PAOneStop is the state’s mapping and planning platform. It supports:
For a hauler or broker, PAOneStop matters because the plans you’re working under were likely built there. Understanding the platform makes it faster to interpret a plan, identify setback boundaries on a field, and confirm you’re within the application windows the plan allows.
Farms that host your work will often send you a plan summary generated out of PAOneStop. If you don’t recognize the format or don’t know how to read it, that’s a good conversation to have with the farm’s certified planner before you show up with equipment.
Pennsylvania restricts manure application during winter and other high-risk periods because those are when nutrients are most likely to run off into surface water instead of staying on the field. The specific rules depend on which plan type governs the farm you’re working, but the core structure applies across the board.
Winter is defined as any of three conditions: the calendar window from December 15 to February 28, ground frozen four inches or deeper, or ground snow-covered. Any of the three triggers winter rules regardless of the date.
Winter application is discouraged but not banned. If you spread during winter, you have to meet stricter setbacks, lower application rates, and additional field condition requirements. Under a Manure Management Plan, that includes a 100-foot setback from streams, lakes, and ponds with no option to reduce it, a 100-foot setback from above-ground drainage inlets where surface flow moves toward the inlet, no application on slopes greater than 15 percent, and at least 25 percent crop residue at application time or an established cover crop.
Winter application rates cap lower than the year-round maximums. The limits are 5,000 gallons per acre of liquid manure, 20 tons per acre of solid non-poultry manure, or 3 tons per acre of solid poultry manure.
Restrictions can shift year to year based on regulatory updates and site-specific plan conditions. Your local conservation district is the best current source, and any agronomic consultant working the region should know the current rules for the fields you’re serving. Confirm the specifics before every winter application season rather than relying on last year’s calendar.
The full August guide on Pennsylvania manure regulations covers the setbacks and application windows in more detail.
Certified haulers and brokers are required to maintain records of manure transport and application. The basics include:
Recordkeeping is not a formality. It’s the paper trail that protects your business.
If a runoff event happens downstream of a field you worked, if a neighbor files an odor complaint, if a regulator shows up asking questions, your records are what establishes what actually happened. A hauler with clean records and documented application within plan parameters is in a completely different position from a hauler who can’t produce paperwork.
The record format has to match what PA DEP expects. If you’re not sure what the current expected format is, ask at your next continuing education session or check with your county conservation district.
Compliance action generally starts with an inspection, not a penalty. If a complaint is filed, DEP or the conservation district will typically investigate to determine what happened. Your records and the farm’s records both come into play. If the application was within the plan, within the rules, and documented properly, most complaints resolve without enforcement. If the paper trail is thin or the application was outside plan parameters, that’s when things get complicated.
Regulations set the rules. Equipment affects how easy the rules are to actually follow, day to day.
Low-disturbance injection places manure below the soil surface. That reduces the odor that drives complaints and the runoff risk that drives seasonal restrictions in the first place. For a custom applicator, a dragline injector opens up sites and application windows that would be off-limits with surface application. It also puts you in a better position when a complaint gets filed, because injected manure is objectively lower-risk than surface-applied manure.
Properly sized hose reels and pumps reduce the number of passes needed to complete a field. Fewer passes means less compaction, less time in the field, and cleaner adherence to plan-defined application boundaries. The Hoover Ag 66HR hose reel handles up to a mile of hose, which cuts setup and teardown time meaningfully across a multi-field day.
Dragline systems in general reduce tanker traffic across fields. That matters for erosion and sedimentation control planning, and for the soil health of the farms you’re serving. A farm that hires you back next year is a farm whose soils weren’t beat up by tanker weight.
The Hoover Ag manure equipment lineup includes the dragline injectors, hose reels, 50 foot dribble bar, and PTO pump that most custom applicators build a compliant operation around.
No. Surface application is still allowed under Pennsylvania rules, and a dribble bar is a real step up from splash-plate surface application in terms of odor and volatilization. Injection is often the easier path for operations with tight compliance windows, sensitive sites, or neighbor concerns, but it’s not the only path. What you actually need depends on the farms you’re serving and the plans you’re working under.
This guide is educational. For decisions that affect your business, the primary sources and the people who work with them daily are the right stops.
If you want to talk through how equipment fits into your compliance work, call Hoover Ag at (610) 468-9666 or get in touch. We build the dragline equipment that many Pennsylvania custom applicators run, and we’d rather help you spec the right setup than sell you the wrong one.
Sources cited in this guide:
For most farms running their own manure with existing tractors in the 200 to 300+ horsepower range, Hoover Ag’s PTO pump covers the job.
Biosolids are the nutrient-rich organic material produced when wastewater treatment plants treat sewage sludge to meet federal and state standards for beneficial use.
If your operation is considering accepting FPR, or if you’re already accepting it and want to make sure you’re on solid ground, a few things need to be in place.