Students at Purdue University are earning some extra money by participating in a program in which they smell livestock excrement, and other materials collected from barns containing a variety of animals.
Albert Heber, a Purdue professor of agricultural and biological engineering, uses the information gathered for his ongoing research on ways to improve methods for guessing how bad a farm smells to its neighbors.
The students smell materials from different parts of a barn at varying degrees of dilution designed to replicate the odors at varying distances from the barn. "We're not smelling it for long" said graduate student Anuj Sharma, "It's just a sniff."
