AIRDRIE, Alta. – When it comes to an unusual job, being a professional sniffer wins by a nose.
As complaints grow over fetid feedlots or pungent piggeries, an objective evaluation is needed to determine how bad the odor is for the neighbors.
“We can do any smell you want, but right now our main clients are agriculture, mainly hogs and cattle,” said Chris Goss of the Alberta Research Council.
With assistance from the University of Alberta, the province and Alberta pork producers, the research council developed a computerized electronic nose and a staff of professional sniffers.
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They have analyzed the air quality in southern Alberta’s feedlot alley near Lethbridge, swine pits for the Prairie Swine Centre
and answered calls from health
authorities.
All this can be done from a mobile unit that costs more than $200,000 to equip.
Air samples are sucked in by a vacuum pump about the size of a picnic cooler. The air is pumped into 10 or 25 kilogram clear plastic bags. Samples are gathered beside the farm, upwind of the farm and the place where the complaint originated.
The unit has a sophisticated computer system that verifies the odor, its strength and what it might be.
The information is turned over to the local health unit, which along with Alberta Environment, decides what action to take.
“We don’t decide. We just supply the data,” said Goss.
About 25 people have been trained and are paid to smell odors collected by the unit. Eight people work for no more than three hours at a time.
Sniffers who try out for the job must be able to detect odors without difficulty.
Those with colds or other respiratory problems are replaced. They may not wear perfume.
The odor is blown through a small plastic funnel and the human sniffers rate it by hedonic tone, which is the pleasantness or offensiveness of an odor.
Samples of odors no more than 24 hours old may be submitted for analysis to the research council labs at Vegreville, Alta.
