Farm minister Femke Wiersma is set to publish her plans to cut the Dutch manure mountain on Friday, and it will include major cuts to the number of dairy cows, and possibly pigs and chickens, the Telegraaf said on Thursday, quoting sources in The Hague.

Wiersma, a minister on behalf of the pro-farming party BBB, will discuss the plans with farming organisations on Thursday and they are likely to lead to angry reactions from farmers, the paper said.

The Dutch intensive farming sector is struggling to deal with reductions in the amount of manure farmers are allowed to spread on their fields, because of the risk of leaching into the waterways and the high concentration of nitrogen. Farmers are now being forced to pay high fees to have the manure disposed of in other ways.

Brussels has made exceptions for the Netherlands in the past, but that situation is unlikely to continue.

The government is due to publish its more detailed strategy on Friday and the manure plan is part of that, the paper said.

The excess manure problem is so big in the Netherlands that some farmers resort to fraud when disposing of it. Earlier this year, NOS and investigative news website Follow the Money said the agriculture ministry had ignored warnings that equipment to detect how much manure farmers are selling or dumping is easy to manipulate for years.

And last week it emerged that farmers have been spraying manure mixed with drugs waste on their onion fields.