Farms smell, and scents travel
Purdue students’ noses help refine odor mitigation techniques
There’s a lot a struggling graduate student will do to make a buck.
Add to the list taking whiffs — for $30 per session — of air collected from barns full of pigs, cows and chickens.
That’s how much Albert Heber, a Purdue University agricultural and biological engineering professor, is paying them to help with his research on odor emissions from farming operations.
“Typically they’re farm smells — manure, farm waste, hay,” said civil engineering graduate student Anuj Sharma. “The only thing that is good is that we are not smelling it for a long time. It’s just a sniff.”
The students smell diluted samples of air taken from different locations on farms. The diluted air represents the odor that air would have at a certain distance from the barn.
The idea is to test different odor-mitigation techniques to see how effective they are. The less diluted the sample needs to be for the odors to be undetectable, the better the method works.
“If it has to be diluted 1,000 times, that’s a pretty strong odor,” Heber said. “We have had samples in the past that have been over 10,000.”
Heber’s work has led to a Web site in which people can input variables — the type of animal on the farm, the number of animals, any odor-elimination techniques used, how manure is processed, etc. — to see how far the odors will travel.
The information can be used to decide how close a residence can be and not be affected by the smells.
Heber said he’s worked with a number of methods to reduce smell. Some are high-tech, such as belts that run under chickens to remove manure as it’s created. Others are as simple as removing manure from the barn more often.
Sallie Fahey, executive director of the Tippecanoe County Area Plan Commission, said Heber’s work can help planning officials quite a bit. She said there are times when residents get upset about contained farming operations that want to set up shop.
“If it’s an area that’s a little close to where there has been a development … that’s when it tends to be contentious,” Fahey said.
Fahey said having data that shows how area residents might be affected could lessen the tension.
Heber’s paid noses said the job isn’t as bad as it sounds, especially since many of them grew up around similar smells.
“It gets a little intense, but since I go out and collect a lot of the samples, it’s not that bad,” said Sam Hanni, a research assistant for Heber. “It’s nothing really strong that would bother you.”
Luca Magnani, a doctoral student in animal science, said the pig farms are the worst to smell, but he’s used to being around animals, so it doesn’t bother him much.
“Grad students are kind of poor,” Magnani said. “I’ve done worse than this.”