If you see a smoking pile of crap on a farm in Baltimore County, local fire stations said don’t call them.

While the smoldering manure may look and smell bad, Jacksonville Volunteer Fire Company assured residents in a Facebook post that unless there are visible flames, the smoke poses no danger to the community.

“Please refrain from tying up emergency resources and taking our volunteers away from their families and jobs to respond,” the Jacksonville Volunteer Fire Company said in its Facebook post. “We sympathize with those affected and urge you to pursue other routes in finding a solution.”

Farmers often stack manure and fertilizer in large piles to follow best practices and environmental regulations, said Hans Schmidt, assistant secretary at the Maryland Department of Agriculture. When a pile becomes moist, spontaneous combustion occurs and the manure can begin to smolder and smoke. At times, this happens when there’s drought and then rain; at other times, mixing different types of fertilizers can cause the smoke.

In the last eight years, dozens of people have called emergency services to report the fertilizer smoke. Chuck Bollinger, a driver with the Cockeysville Volunteer Fire Company, said that in the past, firefighters have been called to the same pile anywhere from six to eight times. On Wednesday, they were alerted twice for the same stack of smoldering manure.

Wetting the piles can make the smoke worse, the Jacksonville Volunteer Fire Company said in its Facebook post.

The manure piles need to be moved or dispersed to disrupt the smoke, but environmental regulations restrict farmers from distributing the fertilizer before it needs to be used. Piling up the manure and letting it “crust” on the outside helps mitigate any runoff or groundwater pollution, Schmidt said.

Schmidt encouraged Marylanders to notify the Department of Agriculture instead of emergency services when they see smoke from manure piles. The department can work around certain regulations if the smoke becomes a major inconvenience to the area, he said.

“If we’re assessing that the smoke is impacting the community in the area, we may request that the farmer to go ahead and spread that litter on that field,” Schmidt said.

Mark Cochrane, a professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, said the smoke can be an annoyance, but it usually has little environmental impact and doesn’t spread into larger fires.

“Usually it just stays and smolders for seemingly ever,” Cochrane said. “Unless they go in there with some kind of like a bulldozer or something and pull it apart.”

Schmidt said manure piles don’t often smolder, but there have been reports of it happening in Baltimore County.

“It happens every now and then,” Schmidt said. “We are in the process right now of pulling some experts together to kind of get a better understanding of this and making sure that we’re managing this correctly.”