| Farmscape for July 16, 2001 (Episode 723)
A scientist with the University of Manitoba suggests the first step toward addressing public concerns over manure is further research into issues related to odor.
Dr. Qiang Zhang says, with large scale livestock production, odor is a concern and, when people smell odor, they tend to perceive a health risk.
He suggests the most important aspect of dealing with odor is public awareness.
He says odor is an issue that may not be as serious as most people think and, once you actually put numbers on it, there's a lot of things that can be done to minimize the problem.
Clip-Dr. Qiang Zhang-University of Manitoba
Well I guess the first thing probably the public should know is the nature of odor and the affect of odor on people.
Odor actually has something to do with the perception.
Unless there is some chemicals in air, unless the concentration of the chemical gets very very high it causes a health problem other wise most cases, it's just a nuisance.
Some people are probably more sensitive to this nuisance or to odor.
They react more probably more sensitively than other people.
I think once we make the public aware that odor is probably something you never can get rid of but, once it's minimized, then it shouldn't be a threat to anybody.
There's a lot of information floating around but I haven't seen a lot of scientific numbers there so we actually are in the process of collecting some of those numbers and there's a lot of people doing research in other parts of the world, like in North Carolina, they've been looking at the effect of odor on the human health and things like that.
Dr. Zhang points out, up until five years ago, there was very little money channeled into research on manure odor and suggests more research is needed.
He says, when dealing with other pollution problems, it's possible to put numbers on them but odor is still difficult to put numbers on.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane. |