How important is an odor?
 

I have lived in both a large city and a very rural farm area.
It takes some getting used to....but I much prefer the rural life. :)

https://media.istockphoto.com/id/106...M8ERlNf2HoAIQ=

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Plus...we have these near-by.
Anaerobic Digesters.

https://media.istockphoto.com/id/485...VErmcPlUblmqo=

Living in a rural setting, smells that I've noticed, fire/smoke, skunk, very occasionally cow/cow patty.

Something else that I notice when we mow and things are growing is some really nice herbal scents. We have something that grows on our land that smells really good when you mow. I have no idea what it is. We also have a few spots with a bunch of wild onion/garlic.

I have a friend that used to live in Oxnard Cali. Apparently there was a chicken farm that she could smell that wasn't very pleasant.

When we lived near downtown Houston, I used to drive, cycle, walk past this bridge (pretty much daily) and during the summer when the wind was right, you smelled the guano from the ~250,000 bats.
https://tpwd.texas.gov/huntwild/wild/species/bats/bat-watching-sites/waugh-drive-bridge.phtml

SE Houston... Could be very important. We have various chemicals, depending on wind direction. Some pretty serious ones...

Generally, though it really isn't bad considering the amount of them that are handled, processed, manufactured, etc... around here.

Air pollution regs are pretty strict. And TCEQ uses FLIR cameras on various aircraft to detect leaks... Pretty interesting tech.

I've heard it's closely tied to memory recollection.
If you kennel a dog, leave a stinky t-shirt to calm them.
And of course getting close to a potential partner is one way to determine compatibility. Entire flower industries are based on it.

Computer mnfr's have made odor machines to increase immersion but that is still a long way off to do right.

I walked out of a Marriott hotel this morning in Brunswick , NJ... and smelled skunk...

Where I was was not really a rural area

Three guys had sparked up a blunt near the bottom of exit of the hotel..

^^^ I thought you were going to say it was from the hotel using a cleaning product.

I've been in stores and hotels that have over-used lysol-like cleaning products in the entries and it makes me nauseous.

There is no Oxnard in Cali.

Cali, city, capital of Valle del Cauca departamento, western Colombia. It lies on both sides of the Cali River at an elevation of 3,327 feet (1,014 metres), in the subtropical intermontane Cauca Valley.

I get rural odor. Specifically- chicken farms.
I also get urban odors

For urban odors, in a good way, sometimes the smell of various foods wafting through the streets. I can taste the bacon cooking at a nearby restaurant every day.

Urban odors are complemented by urban sounds. A reverse beep goes off on a garbage truck.

Likewise rotting food from "Dempster Dumpsters" can be a little challenging.

I'll focus on the fresh bacon! :)

Grandma lived accross the street from an egg farm, smell wasnt that bad but the flies were!
A pig farm on the other hand, thats tuff!!

The egg farms now are huge and carefully controlled. (around here anyways)
I drove past Herbrucks Eggs today on the way back from the airport. This egg farm is supposed to be the largest in the mid-west with over 10 million laying hens.

There was no noticeable smell.

Oh gawd! Last time I went in one, it was ammonia excrement and random dead chicken smell that no amount of side wall mounted industrial fans could eradicate. :D

Smell tickles the primitive part of your brain, stirs memories

Uncle Jack would not eat chicken cooked over a fire with its skin. He thought it looked and smelled too much like what a burned body did, memories from when he was a lad. I can see how that might affect a teenager. The charred skin and fat that you get over an open flame is about the best way to fix chicken, if you ask me. Fortunately, USN generally cooks with steam heat, so it did not come up much.

Another one that gets me a milking refinery. A cousin had one. I went in on an early morning tour in the heat of summer. Something about the warm fresh milk and cowshi*** in a hot high humidity environment hit me the wrong way at 4:30 in the A.M. . :eek:

Today's chicken laying farms are very careful with bio-security. Nobody, other than suited and cleaned workers can enter the coops.
Any truck that delivers feed for the barns must be scrubbed down before driving on the property.
With millions of hens packed in together..one wrong germ from a diff farm can wipe them out.

Interesting. My memories were 40+ years ago. And like smells do- linger! :)

On 9/11 at about 8:30 am I went into a deli to order an egg and cheese on a roll and I recall as I walked through the door thinking how the place smelled exactly like my elementary school cafeteria that I hadn’t thought about in 25 years. Now when I think of 9/11 the first thing I think about is that smell and my elementary school cafeteria. Then for months after, all I could smell around the city was this chemical electrical burning smell lingering….occasionally when I’m driving around I’ll smell that smell from who knows where and it brings me right back there.

The older chicken farms had cages of laying hens suspended from the roof of the building. The manure would drop into a conveyor for disposal.

The trouble with that set-up was when a thunderstorm would come and all the hens would jump at the same time and when landing would take all the cages down.

I was in on a few rescue jobs when this happened. Crawl around the broken cages and pull the hens out and place them on a loading belt into a truck. From there they were destined for a soup can.

A couple hours of this and the chicken ***** was in your skin and clothes....fun times.

Manure spreader? Sort of smelly.

Skunk. Not pleasant.

What gets me is a dryer sheet. Damn. I DETEST that smell.

I grill a lot on a Weber Genesis and use a Traeger smoker. Quick and easy.

I was walking my dog through the local park the other day and some people were having a little celebration and had just started the grill with the Kingsford briquets and the charcoal lighter fluid.

That smell took me back to 1976, Frisbee in the park and Grand Funk on the 8 Track. Time to break out the Weber Kettle for old time's sake.

That was a chicken poop spray they used on the fields for fertilization. That's some prime farmland there, or once was. They seem to be paving over a lot of it.

The poop probably came from Egg City in Moorpark. Now, anyone who has ever driven over Grimes Canyon back then could tell you, that was a "stank".

In 1961, Julius Goldman founded Egg City, which was a massive chicken farm north of Moorpark, with many chicken coops spread over acres of concrete with millions of chickens in them. The main building had a giant chicken statue on the top of it. Local residents were somewhat irked by the farm, when the smell of it wafted to Moorpark on windy days. The business suffered a setback in 1972, when more than 3 million chickens were slaughtered because of the threat of Newcastle disease. The farm finally closed in 1996. In early December 2006, a wildfire destroyed the dilapidated remains of Egg City.

I used to drive through an industrial area in Montgomery, Alabama. One facility made creosote soaked utility poles, and next door was a pickle plant. It reeked with those smells mixed.

There was a cotton gin across the fence from our house on base at Maxwell, AFB. It had a strong stink, and often left a yellow powder on our cars, and everything outside.

I was just in a hotel suite in Switzerland that had built in scent diffusers throughout….there was a controller on the wall and 4 scents to choose from - first time I’ve ever seen that but I have to say waking up to a nice pleasant scent was quite nice! I’ve been near pig farms as well, this was better!

Grew up 1/8 mile north of a mink “ranch” I’m amazed that people still operate those things. Next level smell.

A joke I still remember that I heard on KMET is that Moorpark spelled backwards is Kraproom. How appropriate. Intentional perhaps?

Way back when I was an apprentice chromatographer I was doing simple assays on the essential oils we used in the hard surface cleaners we sold.

We made a change to one of our products widely used in pet shops. Not long after distributing the new cleaner complaints from shop owners started pouring in. They said that as soon as they started using it the birds went nuts.

Long story short after replacing that product with stores of the original t the birds were back to normal. We then amended our R&D to include animal sensitivity to fragrance.

We have a dog that has seizures….there have been some studies that show certain scents/aromas can trigger seizures and other behavior, so that is interesting about the birds….

Back in the olden days of film processing color negatives (C-41) I ran a film processor. One of the chemicals after the developer was called bleach-fix and a dark orange color. If that tank had to dumped for any reason, a fresh batch had to be mixed, and a part of that startup process was adding a "starter" to season the chemicals to be ready to process the film.

Anyway, the Bleach Starter was the most noxious stuff ever. The first time I used it, I had been warned about it. I made sure the building was empty, except for me. I turned on the two exhaust fans, in the processor room, I turned on all the AC fans to circulate the air overnight, I put on a rubber apron, and long rubber gloves and goggles then I hyperventilated until the point I was about to pass out, held my breath, cracked open the bottle, poured out the few hundred milliliters, poured it in the tank, ran to the sink to rinse the beaker, and hauled ass to the front of the 5,000 square foot building. My skin was tingling, and eyes watering. I had to take a breath as I opened the door to leave.

It still stunk the next morning, but was acceptable. A few years later the Oklahoma City police called me on a Sunday, and they needed to set up their photo lab to process the crime scene photos of a death of a police officer. It was all easy until we came to the bleach-fix starter. I told the cop I was working with that was his issue, I put tape on the side of the beaker for him to see how much to add, and he put on a gas mask and I went down the hall. He came out soon after and said that stuff stinks!

I am real happy I don't ever have to do that again.

I worked 5 years for Howmet Inc in the 70's making the titanium vanes for jet engines.
My workbench was about 15 feet from the degreaser, which looked like a chest freezer with a chain-fall and basket to lower parts in and out.
No need to even stop the basket...just lower and raise as it went through the wafting cloud of Trichloroethane and all grease and dirt was gone.

The trouble was, every time the basket would be raised out, a portion of the cloud would come out with the parts.
I always wondered what kind of damage it might do...the smell was strong.

I love the country and yep lots of poo but it's not like that stank you get in a big city (that sweet rotting pork mixed with stale water smell).

- I mean no disrespect to our Asian brothers and sisters but I always avoid the "China Town" of any big city. :(

My grandfather works at the Armor Meat Packing plant, next to the stock yards from the day they opened until the day they closed. He went from loading and unloading rail cars, to running the Credit Union over the years.

Anyway I remember my grandmother driving him to work, and we rode along in the back seat. The stock yards was stink of cattle manure, but the meat packing plant was a stink all to itself. They took in living cattle, and shipped out cut up pieces of meat. The rendering plant was next door and they got the dead cattle and live stock from the area, and rendered them down to usable products. It was a low rent housing area for some reason, but my dad was born in a house just a mile away.

As a kid, even though we lived in the suburbs of a major city, there was a rendering plant about 10 miles away and in the mornings when the wind was “ just right”, you could smell it. Reminded me of slightly rancid vegetable soup.

There is a dog food manufacturing plant a few miles from us. On some days when there is just light breeze blowing the right way it smells like everyone in the neighborhood is making toast. The NAPA parts store I use is just blocks away for the dog food plant. They get a lot stronger stinky odor.

Odor must not be too important to some people. When I was in the Army at Fort Lewis, WA in the mid 60s, I would go through Tacoma some times. At that time there was a pulp mill in the area, and the whole area stank to high heavens. I suppose the people who lived there were used to it. I wouldn't have lived there with that constant smell.

Oh yeah paper mills are stinky AF!

3rd for paper factories. Covington, Va. smells like high hell depending on wind.
Strangely, it's a little like skunk smell... meaning, from a distance, at a very light whiff, it's not the worst thing, and can remind you of younger days, but up close, it's hell on the nose.

During hot summer days near a paper mill, the acrid air will burn your eyes. Air so acidic it would peel paint off the houses, had they not been coated in some 1940's lead based paint.

A friend of mine who sold tractors in the area asked a client "how do you tolerate the smell?"
The local responded "Boy, that's the smell of money!":D

Speaking of odor am I the only who hates those commercials for "Lume"? Some cream for "Your feet, pits and you can even use it on your butt!". Grosses me out.

You will know a bad smell when a selenium rectifier heats and burns. Common in <'60's electronics.