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Livestock industries are a significant component of agriculture and proper management of manure streams they generate is necessary for their long-term viability. Major advancements in municipal and industrial wastewater treatment were made possible by investigative work on waste stream constituents, their properties, and how those properties can be modified and exploited to improve treatment. In contrast, significantly less attention has been given to characterizing animal waste stream constituent properties and optimizing manure treatment systems. More exploratory and applied research is needed in this area. To that end a technique was developed for separating manure particles into size fractions using a relatively simple vacuum-assisted wet-sieving procedure. The technique was applied to dairy manure and the resulting particle fractions were then analyzed to determine how particle properties varied with particle size. Results indicate that 80-percent of the total mass of fresh manure was associated with particle sizes larger than 5 m and large particles had significantly larger organic matter content than smaller particles; 25-percent of the solids in the flushed manure stream were colloidal and dissolved matter that originated from the lagoon via the flush water stream; and the inclined-screen liquid-solid separator removed 70% of fiber/particles in the 10 m to 1,270 m range, although the screen opening size was 1,270 m, which leads to the conclusion that the removal of small fiber/particles may have been assisted by the presence of larger fiber/particles. Preliminary investigations indicate that nitrogen content may vary with particle size and information of this nature can be useful in modeling nutrient transport and fate.