06/13/08 Managing the Smell

Managing the Smell. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. My brother used to raise pigs. Only a dozen or so as part of a 4-H projects and anytime I helped him, I could not miss the odor. Dad called it the smell of money. But multiply that dozen or so by a thousand and suddenly that odor can become a problem. It is something that Dr. Terry Whitehead with USDA'a Agriculture Research Service is working on. WHITEHEAD: We got a mandate or directive from our national program staff to start looking into the problem of odor from the large scale plant facilities where they have to store manure for longer periods of time. The odor that emanates from the stored manure is pretty powerful and there's a fair number of unrests from neighbors and potential health risks and things like that. Yup, that same pungent odor can be really annoying not to mention the other emissions like methane. That odor is caused by bacteria. WHITEHEAD: We started looking at basically what bacteria live in there because no one has ever looked at that before and then what can we do to potentially intervene in the metabolism either by adding something to the pits or some other mechanism or way to reduce their activity. There are a couple of alternatives that are being worked on that show good promise. One is the addition of tannin. WHITEHEAD: There's a problem trying to intervene, trying to find something, a product that's economical and safe to use and something that is broad-range enough to attack the different bacteria that are present there so it's kind of a tough nut to crack so to speak. That's why we are trying to look at natural products that could be used and not be harmful to the environment but has to be applied to the land eventually. Another alternative that seems to work quite well is by sprinkling the pits with good old-fashioned borax powder. Whitehead also says there is a reason you can smell a hog farm from some distance. WHITEHEAD: What's interesting about hog manure odor is it tends to attach itself to dust particles so it can actually travel a good distance depending on how the wind blows so you can actually detect it a good distance away from the facility. I'm sure the 20 mule team borax company didn't that in mind when they were sponsoring Death Valley Days all those years ago. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.