Accumulations of excess nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) on agricultural landscapes are increasingly garnering attention from environmental regulators and activists. When inflows of nutrients to a geographic area appreciably exceed outflows the opportunities for water contamination are increased. The most common policy approach in Europe to avoid such accumulations is to require some minimum area of land for each animal on a farm. A more sophisticated variation is to require that farms or groups of farms maintain a nutrient balance over some period of years. We investigated the current state of the balance of nutrient inflows and outflows for civil towns in Wisconsin to learn the range of typical values and to investigate how various characteristics of the local farm industry affected the nutrient balance.