Development of a procedure to determine odour emissions from animal farming for regulatory purposes in Flanders

Abstract

The purpose of the project described in this paper was to develop a procedure to determine odour emissions at existing and new intensive animal farming houses. The procedure should be scientifically valid and preferably applicable on a large scale at reasonable costs. In this project odour emissions were measured during one year at the same farm. Measurements included 20 olfactometric sampling days and 50 sniffing measurements, all spread over one year. For each olfactometric sampling day, samples were taken in duplicate for the different pig categories. The olfactometric analysis resulted in the determination of odour emission factors for growing/fattening pigs, weaned piglets, dry sows and farrowing sows. The influence of external parameters (ventilation rate, inside temperature, outside temperature, pen dirtiness, number of pigs and their weight) was examined. Good correlation between the odour emission and an external parameter could only be found for the ventilation rate (r = 0.98) and outside temperature (r = 0.87). The sniffing measurements resulted in maximal odour perception distances and odour emissions calculated with short and long term dispersion models. No significant influence of the outside temperature (season) could be found here. The results of the olfactometric and sniffing measurements will be presented, including a combination of both techniques to determine the odour emission of an agricultural construction.