Identification of key odour components in pig house air using hyphenated gas chromatography olfactometry

Abstract

The exposure to odorants from animal production facilities creates a serious problem in the form of odour annoyance for the surrounding society and thus for the agricultural industry. The identification of the key odour components responsible for the odour annoyance is important in the search for odour reducing methods and could be useful for quantitative purposes as well. The objective of the present study was to investigate the application of the hyphenated gas chromatography olfactometry technique (GCO) called Detection Frequency Analysis for the identification of key odour components in an odorous air sample collected in a grower/finisher pig house. Detection Frequency Analysis is based on a combination of gas chromatography and a human panel sniffing to odours eluting from the gas chromatographic column. The human sniffing panel detected 25 odours from a grower/finisher pig house air extract. Subsequent gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analysis resulted in the identification of propanoic acid, 2-methylpropanoic acid (iso-butanoic acid), butanoic acid,