Dr Heinrich Mannebeck, the German pioneer of olfactometry, died at 86 on 29 Dec. 2022. As an agriculture scientist, he started in 1976 with a simple olfactometric device to take ambient indoor and outdoor samples of clearly noticeable concentrations. Then, 20 years later, he founded the company Ecoma with his children Dorothee and Dietmar Mannebeck. This company was initially based in Kiel, but 2 years later was moved to  a detached house between farms and apple trees in the little town of Honigsee.

  In the 1970s, the urban exodus began in Germany. Many moved to the countryside with their families. At first, they still found the smell of manure, animals and stables pleasant, but at some point, it became annoying. More and more complaints came across the desk of Dr Heinrich Mannebeck, a member of staff at the Institute of Agricultural Process Engineering at Christian Albrechts University in Kiel. But there were no methods of measuring odour at that time.

   Cattle farms consist of various spatially extended odour-emitting areas representing ground-level diffuse odour sources. These include loose-housing systems with outdoor exercise areas, the supplied diet, and storage areas for silage, slurry and solid manure. The aim of this study was to identify relevant odour sources on cattle farms and to compare the odour concentrations of individual sources, bearing in mind descriptive parameters.   

   Compared with hay and sugar beet pulp (mean: <750 OU_E m⁻³), higher odour concentrations resulted from the cut surface of grass silage (3990 OU_E m⁻³) and maize silage (1690 OU_E m⁻³) in the stores as well as from the mixed ration with silage on the feed table (2955 OU_E m⁻³). Samples from the solid floors in the cattle housing (feeding and cubicle access aisles, outdoor exercise area) and from solid manure stores showed higher odour concentrations (1485 resp. 1845 OU_E m^-3) than littered areas such as cubicles and deep-bedded areas (<500 OU_E m⁻³).