Contemporary agriculture is characterized by the intensive production of livestock in confined facilities and land application of stored waste as an organic fertilizer. Emission of nitrous oxide (N2O) from receiving soils is an important but poorly constrained term in the atmospheric N2O budget. In particular, there are few data for N2O emissions from spray fields associated with industrial scale swine production facilities that have rapidly expanded in the southeastern United States. In an intensive, 24-day investigation over three spray cycles, we followed the time course for changes in N2O emission and soil physicochemical variables in an agricultural field irrigated with liquid lagoonal swine effluent. The total N (535 mg L-1) of the liquid waste was almost entirely NH4+-N (>90%) and thus had a low mineralization potential. Soil profiles for nitrification and denitrification indicated that >90% of potential activity was localized in the surface 20 cm. Application of this liquid fertilizer to warm (19¿ to 28¿C) soils in a form that is both readily volatilized and immediately utilizable by the endogenous N-cycling microbial community resulted in a sharp decline in soil NH4+-N and supported a rapid but short-lived (i.e., days) burst of nitrification, denitrification, and N2O emission. Nitrous oxide fluxes as high as 9200 &mgr;g N2O-Nm-2h-1 were observed shortly after fertilization, but emissions decreased to prefertilization levels within a few days. Poor correlations between N2O efflux and soil physicochemical variables (temperature, moisture, NO3--N, NH4+-N) and fertilizer loading rate point to the complexity of interacting factors affecting N2O production and emission. Total fertilizer N applied and N2O-N emitted were 29.7 g m-2 (297 kg N ha-1) and 395 mg m-2, respectively. The fractional loss of applied N to N2O (corrected for background emission) was 1.4%, in agreement with the mean of 1.25% reported for mineral fertilizers. The direct effects of fertilizer application appear to be more immediate and short-lived for liquid swine waste than for manures and slurries, which have a slower release of nitrogenous nutrients. ¿ 2000 American Geophysical Union