Thanks for the reply Gerard!  Buying land would be the ideal option, but too expensive, unavailable, and right now it's not really an option to add even more work at this point since I am leaving the farm.  I guess using a dragline on alfalfa would be an option, I'll look into that.  I think one local contractor bought the equipment needed for that.

There are definitely some significant costs involved with my plan too.  I was looking at some info today and a floating membrane would cost around 85k...  I don't think evaporation is that big in our case, since the solids make a crust on the surface and reduce water losses.  Removing solids + floating membrane would thus reduce total volume quite significantly, but at what cost? As for the separator, a screw type separator would be ideal because it can be found in small enough sizes for our herd size.  But wear is an issue.  The Houle setup would be perfect, but costly, and way to high capacity for what we need.  And I don't think I'll ever be able to convince the brothers from using anything else than straw for bedding.  But being so close to a large city, selling composted manure would probably be a profitable venture.