One of the significant odor sources on swine farms is manure storage. This study investigated reducing odor and gas emissions from a 29 m by 39 m anaerobic swine lagoon by capturing gases beneath a 0.41mm thick, flexible reinforced polyethylene membrane. The cover was anchored and sealed about its perimeter by burying the edges in a trench around the lagoon embankment.

This paper is a review of the work accomplished in the Swine Odor and Waste Strategic Research Initiative (SOWM SRI) of Illinois Council on Food and Agricultural Research (C-Far) during state fiscal years 99, 00, 01, 02 and 03. The format of the paper will be topical in nature and not necessarily chronological. We have pursued research objectives in a number of years and the topic and current position will be discussed here.

The work reported here has two separate focus areas. The focus of our dispersion modeling studies was to improve the description of odor transport to better account for effects of elevated sources, trees surrounding a hog facility, and terrain features such as ravines. The second focus was the development of methods to calibrate an odor-measurement device developed throughout the SRI and operating procedures that assure the instrument yields reproducible results.

Historically animal agriculture has been a significant social, economic and environmental force for rural America . Animal production creates thousands of jobs and adds value to grain and forages. In some regions animal agriculture is a leading value-adding industry and serves as an important economic engine for a community. Increasingly though there is a growing public awareness of the environmental impacts and nuisances caused by livestock facilities.

Our goal was to compare what newspapers said with what people in the area believed were actual problems ex post facto, so we kept the 22 newspapers and 52 counties the newspapers covered as the basic units of the survey. We selected as survey respondents members of the major stakeholder groups identified in newspaper articles as involved in local controversies over the building of LSSF: farmers who were building new or expanding swine operations, neighbors of these farmers, zoning board officials, and anti-LSSF activists.

Animal waste management has been and continues to be a growing environmental issue. The estimated useable amount of manure produced by confined animals (swine included) is more than 61 million tons per year (Sutton, 1996). As swine concentration and farm proximity to urban areas continues to increase concerns about the management of manure, also, continues to increase.

It has been estimated that about half of the odorous emissions from swine facilities originate in the buildings themselves. Other work in the Illinois C-FAR Swine Odor and Waste Management Strategic Research Initiative has addressed gaseous emissions from manure pits and lagoons as well as dust emissions. But emissions of gaseous components from the houses per se has not been addressed in the SRI.

A system dynamics model of pig growth and associated farm level economic impact is developed to evaluate the economic feasibility of three nutritional approaches (phase feeding, avoiding over-formulation, and more accurate estimate of nutrient requirements) to reduce nutrient excretion. The strategies are evaluated in terms of ARC elasticity of nutrient excretion with respect to profit. Model simulations suggest that more accurate nutrient requirement estimations may be a more profitable way than the other approaches evaluated to reduce nutrient excretion from swine producing facilities.

Previous reviews have covered our work on the efficacy of a new E. coli -derived phytase (expressed in yeast) for releasing phytate-bound phosphorus (P) present in corn-soybean meal diets for young pigs, growing-finishing pigs, broiler chicks and laying hens (Baker and Augspurger, 2002; Augspurger, 2003; Augspurger et al., 2003a). It is not our intent to repeat this information, but instead to present new information.

Geographic concentration of production in the swine industry seems increasingly at odds with the fundamental expectation that swine manure will be land applied, safely and according to sound agronomic principles. This tension is evident, in part, in a growing regulatory oversight concerned that both the difficulty of land application of manure and the risks associated with failure increase as the size of operation increases.

Statutes, regulations, and common-law principles govern the activities of livestock producers in the United States. The federal government and 50 individual states have authority to enact laws; federal and state administrative agencies enact regulations to implement these laws. In addition, federal and state courts decide cases that affect agricultural producers. Though producers are subject to many of the same laws that govern other individuals and companies, some laws and regulations apply specifically to agriculture, while others provide exemptions for agriculture.

Swine odor and manure management are important for the long term vitality of the swine industry in Illinois. Odor complaints for existing facilities can be quite difficult for a producer to know what to do in attempting to decrease odor emitted from the farm. Odor is related to many different factors, some of which can be controlled by producers and some which cannot be controlled by producers. This project investigated the controllable and uncontrollable factors that were related to the amount of odor emitted from swine finishing buildings.

Animal production has become highly specialized, industrialized and concentrated geographically in various parts of the world. In Europe swine production volumes strongly increased over the last decades. In Europe main swine producing areas can be found in the north (e.g. Denmark , the Netherlands , Belgium , Brittany in France, Niedersachen in Germany ) and the south ( Lombardy in Italy , Catalunia and Galicia in Spain ; Figure 1). Expansion and specialization have enabled higher productivity level at the farms.

There are several valid reasons to try to separate the liquid and solid fractions of manure. Unfortunately, the most effective separation methods are expensive and actually add material to the manure. Therefore, the selection of a liquid-solid separation system must address the overall goals of the production facility and practical cost constraints 1.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the cost effectiveness of the odor control strategies identified to be important in reducing odor emissions from swine finishing buildings by Miller et al. (2003). Cost effectiveness analysis in this paper evaluates the marginal reduction in odor emission rates relative to the increase in production costs per market hog sold due to the application of an odor management option. Miller et al. (2003) examined the effects of different practices and building characteristics controlled by management on odor emitted from pig finishing buildings. Results showed that greater pig space, air treatment, shallower manure depths, and the use of deep pits reduced odor emission rates of swine finishing buildings. Specifically, the odor emission rate measured at a deep pit building, assuming other factors were held constant, was 0.17 log OU/h lower than that at a shallow pit building; an increase of one m 2 in pig floor space decreases the odor emission rate by 0.25 log OU/h; one additional meter (3.3 ft.) of manure depth increases the odor emission rate by 0.26 log OU/h; and improving observed air dustiness (another study variable) by one decreases odor emission rate by 0.07 log OU/h.

Treatment methods are presented that can be used for nutrient recovery from animal manure and these processes are compared to the current practice. Using swine feeding operations as an example, the current practice for waste handling is that 97% of all produced waste is applied to owned or rented land after storing the waste in below-floor slurry pits or anaerobic lagoons without cover. This current practice has resulted in a significant environmental pollution. Slurry storage results in emission of odor, VOCs (mainly CH 4 ) and ammonia under normal operating conditions. In many cases there is not sufficient farmland for a sustainable land application without exceeding maximum nitrogen and phosphorus levels. New government regulations will encourage the treatment of animal residuals. Both aerobic and anaerobic process can be used to produce a valuable product from animal manure that can be reused. Phosphorus can be recovered by precipitation in combination with a biological phosphorus removing activated sludge system or by membrane separation in combination with anaerobic digestion.

It has been estimated that about half of the odorous emissions from swine facilities originate in the buildings themselves. Other work in the Illinois C-FAR Swine Odor and Waste Management Strategic Research Initiative has addressed gaseous emissions from manure pits and lagoons as well as dust emissions. But emissions of gaseous components from the houses per se has not been addressed in the SRI.

Odors are emitted from a variety of sources in swine production facilities. A large quantity of odorants can be emitted from manure handling and storage facilities. However, swine production buildings can also emit significant levels of odorants. This is especially true if manure is held within the buildings for periods exceeding 4-5 days. Manure also sticks to floors, walls, equipment, and pigs. Feed is often spilled in areas where pigs don't clean it up. This manure and feed can be around for several days or weeks and release highly objectionable odorants if these organic materials break down under anaerobic conditions. The amount of surface area of these odorant sources can be large and lead to high emissions of odorous gases. To further complicate matters, swine buildings usually have high concentrations of dust in the air and odorants adhere to the dust so the dust can also carry odors out of the buildings (Hoff et al., 1997a).

“Odor” is elicited by chemicals in a gas phase which are detected via olfaction producing recognizable smells (cinnamon, lemon) and/or chemesthesis which mediates pungent sensations (tingling, burning, etc) in response to substances such as ammonia. Responses transmitted by the olfactory nerve elicit aroma. Many compounds are pungent at high concentrations. Many compounds detected by chemesthesis via trigeminal nerve stimulation are strong nasal, ocular and throat irritants (Cometto-Muniz et al., 1997, 1998). There are a number of factors which affect odor including the v olatile compounds themselves, the number of olfactory receptors available to bind them, the degree to which the compounds become solvated for receptor binding, temperature, humidity, and the matrix in which the odor-producing chemicals are embedded. In addition, individual chemicals may interact (chemically). Odors vary in threshold, intensity and hedonic tone. Measuring odor intensity alone is insufficient to assess human perception of odor (Misselbrook et al., 1993).

Phosphorus (P) is an essential element for normal growth, development, and reproduction of both plants and animals. However, excessive P levels can impair surface water quality.

The past 20 years have resulted in significant financial and structural changes in the US swine industry. Production contracts, vertical integration and industry consolidation have been the forces behind these changes, not the least of which is an increase in the size and scale of swine producing facilities. The apparent shift away from independent pork production, on what rural residents often refer to as “family farms,” creates concerns about the ownership arrangements and the implications for corporate trends in agriculture. In addition, the increased number of animals and amounts of manure produced raises the potential for conflict.

Danish farmers produceclose to 24 millions pigs per year.85% of this production is exported, and this makes Denmark one of the world's largest exporters of pigmeat. It also makes pigmeat the country's most important export product at around 6 % of total value.

Dust and ammonia are two major air pollutants that are emitted from confinement animal feeding operations (CAFO) as well as odor. Many air-cleaning technologies are available, but most of them are not applicable for CAFO pollutant control not only because they are out of typical CAFO owners' budget, but also because few of them are able to reduce the emission of these three pollutants simultaneously. There is a need for a cost effective device that can reduce simultaneously dust, ammonia and odor.

The mythical Ag. Engineer Hercules devised the solution to pollution some 4000 years ago, but in the last 40 years his formula became obsolete by the accumulation of unprecedented quantities of wastes causing the worst ever degradation of our natural environment. Fortuitously, the greatest progress in advancing the solution to pollution has been made in the last four decades, as well. So, as the legendary English novelist Dickens could put it, the last 40 years have been the worst and the best of times for the environment.

Hundreds of millions of tonnes of swine waste are generated annually worldwide as a by-product of international pork production (Rhymer et al., 1995). During the late 20 th Century, a shift occurred in the industry from more traditional, limited-confinement pork production techniques to swine confinement facility production in order to meet public demand for leaner pork and to minimize pork production costs. This shift increased swine waste “production concentration”, or the amount of waste generated in a limited geographical area available for agricultural land application, referred to as “land-limited conditions”. Therefore, swine waste production may exceed the capacity of the local or regional environment to properly assimilate this waste through agricultural land application and/or discharge to natural aquatic systems (Hatfield and Stewart, 1998).

Better accounting of manure nutrients helps save commercial fertilizer costs and helps establish the value of manure assigned to neighboring crop farmers. Federal and state regulations require reporting of manure applications to cropland, and imply that calibration of equipment must be carried out to some (unspecified) level of accuracy. Furthermore, there are areas within many fields where application of manure is not allowed at all; automatic shutoff of equipment when entering those setback areas is needed. Most liquid slurry tank spreaders have a simple gate valve on the discharge pipe to the applicator, and the gate valve is opened fully while spreading manure in the field. Those spreaders do not have any method for varying the flow rate of manure coming out of the tank; therefore the only way to change the application rate per acre is to vary the ground speed of the vehicle.