Purdue students sniff livestock manure for cash

January 23, 2008 — 

For most people, smelling the stench from livestock farms is unpleasant at best, but for Purdue University students, it helps provide a living.

Students earn $30 per session for sniffing smells collected from livestock barns to help with odor research being done by Albert Heber, a professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Purdue, the Journal and Courier (Lafayette/West Lafayette, Ind.) reported.

Placing their noses inside an olfactometer, students sniff diluted samples of air taken from different locations on farms, representing the odors the air would have at various distances from the barn. The work provides Heber with data for his ongoing research on improving methods for determining a given livestock farming operation's odor emissions.

"Grad students are kind of poor," animal science doctoral student Luca Magnani told the Journal and Courier. "I've done worse than this."

Source:
MeatingPlace.com