Measurement and impact of agricultural odors from a large scale swine production farm.

With the move on a nationwide scale to greater centralization and specialization of swine production and consequent swine confinement, rural communities face the prospects of increasing odor impact from these sources. The enactment of regulations to prevent community odor nuisance requires the establishment of limits to reflect emissions which may be found to exceed such community standards. While urban industrial sources of odor such as rendering plants and coke ovens are required to meet source emission limits as a result of citizen complaint related litigation, agricultural sources are, in most states, exempt from such legal restrictions. However, should a burden of nuisance complaints come into evidence, data showing individual source emission measurements of these new upscaled livestock facilities as odor sources is of great importance. This study of a 50,000 animal swine-growing facility show that the greatest odor impact originates from the gestation buildings (1,200,00 ou/min), nursery buildings (630,000 ou/min) and field sprinklers (334, 156 ou/min). As shown by a comparison of urban odor source related citizen complaint data versus source measurement results and types of successful abatement actions on an urban scale, an air scrubber system to serve these buildings together with the substitution of ground injection to replace field sprinkling of liquid waste would be expected to achieve the improvement in odor control comparable to urban industrial sources with similar reduction or elimination of odor complaints.