Author(s)

S. Barrington, L. Xingjun, D. Choinière & S. Prasher

Abstract

Windbreaks are believed to help disperse odours emitted by livestock facilities. This project compared odour dispersion for a site without and another with a windbreak consisting of a single row of deciduous trees with an optical porosity of 35%. Both sites, without and with a windbreak were subjected to the emission of swine manure odours produced by an odour generator and the resulting odour plume was measured by three groups of four trained panellists calibrated using a forced choice dynamic olfactometer. This calibration was used to relate the group’s field odour intensity perception to an actual odour concentration in odour units (OU). In September 2004, the windbreak site was evaluated 15 times while the site without a windbreak was evaluated 4 times. The odour plume which developed on both sites was found to be quite erratic with zones of high odour concentration intercepted and others of low and even non-detectable odour concentration. Nevertheless, a regression method using classification for the data on each site indicated that the windbreak could reduce the odour dispersion distance by 20%, on the average. Keywords: windbreak, odour dispersion, separation distance. 1 Introduction The development of the livestock industry in North America and in Europe is jeopardized by their emissions of odours which are a nuisance for neighbours. These odours are produced mainly during the handling of manures, but can also originate from feed storage and dust emissions. Since there are no technologies which can completely eliminate these odours, livestock operations and environmental authorities use air dilution as remediation measure. The concept consists in building the livestock operation far enough that ambient climatic and

Keywords

windbreak, odour dispersion, separation distance.