Professor appointed to USDA Air Quality Task Force
November 4, 2008
University Park, Pa. — Eileen Wheeler, professor of agricultural engineering in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences, has been appointed to a two-year term on the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Air Quality Task Force.
One of the founders of Penn State's Odor Assessment Laboratory in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, Wheeler has been involved in agricultural emissions and air-quality research for more than 10 years. Before that, she spent a decade studying ways to improve air quality inside agricultural buildings, both at Penn State and at Cornell University, where she earned both her master's and doctoral degrees in agricultural engineering and agricultural and biological engineering, respectively.
The task force, which consists of leaders in farming, industry, health and science, was created by Congress in the 1990s to address agricultural air-quality issues as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency struggled to enforce air-pollution standards on farming operations.
"Air pollution from agriculture — especially ammonia emissions — has not been carefully studied the way smokestack emissions from industry have been," said Wheeler. "Nationally, Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences was among the first to document the extent of ammonia emissions from intensive poultry operations."
According to Robert Steele, dean of the College of Agricultural Sciences, it was important to have someone of Wheeler's caliber appointed to the agricultural task force to represent the Northeast. "Because agriculture is so different in different climate zones around the country, it is critical to get input from scientists in the different regions," he said. "Eileen is an expert on agricultural air-quality challenges faced by farms in Pennsylvania and neighboring states."
Wheeler said when it comes to air-quality problems, agricultural definitely is different in the Northeast than it is in the Midwest and other regions. As a result, the EPA faces different enforcement concerns in the Northeast. "Here in Pennsylvania, we have many successful and viable farms that are quite small compared to the scale of operations at some dairies and poultry operations in the Midwest and West," she explained. "In the Midwest, it is not uncommon to see a poultry operation that has 5 million hens or a dairy farm that has many thousands of cattle."
On the other hand, Wheeler noted, Pennsylvania confronts agricultural air-quality problems that other states in more sparsely populated regions of the country don't face because their larger farming operations are usually in isolated locations. "I think our state is a lovely patchwork of farming, residential and light industrial, all mixed together," she said. "But that can create problems when it comes to agriculture odor.
"We have much smaller setbacks from property lines, and that can make the odors coming from intensive animal agriculture seem worse. It just doesn't do any good here to say, 'Your barn has to be a mile from the property line.'"
Perhaps not surprisingly, Wheeler's work on indoor agricultural air-quality problems has implications for tacking outdoor air-quality issues. "One of the solutions to improving the air conditions inside facilities is to use ventilation systems to move the ammonia-laden air outside and bring in fresh air," she said. "But now, EPA officials say they don't want the ammonia outside, either. We have to come up with strategies to mitigate it."
Contact
Jeff Mulhollem
jjm29@psu.edu
814-863-2719
Contact Chuck Gill
cdg5@psu.edu
814-863-2713