The study, completed by Shane Rogers, a former EPA environmental engineer and associate professor at Clarkson University in New York, relied on both air and physical samples collected from the house exteriors of the farms’ neighbors.

Throughout the course of his investigation, Rogers visited “several neighbor homes,” including houses selected randomly the day of his visit. “At every visit and every home, I experienced offensive and sustained swine manure odors to varying intensity, from moderate to very strong," he wrote. To test for the presence of pig-manure DNA, ... fourteen of seventeen homes tested positive for Pig2bac.

Additionally, all six of the dust samples they collected from the air “contained tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of hog feces DNA particles,” Rogers wrote, “demonstrating exposure to hog feces bioaerosols for clients who breathe in the air at their homes. Considering the facts, it is far more likely than not that hog feces also gets inside the clients’ homes where they live and where they eat.”

Rogers described the mechanisms by which the odors from hog operations linger on the clothing of those who live and work nearby, comparing the effect to a nonsmoker spending time in a room that once allowed smokers. After spending time in the field, Rogers and his colleagues carried the scent of pig excrement on their clothing, he wrote: “I personally suffered on an airplane after sampling Greenwood 1 in the barns because I smelled like pig manure all the way home to the Adirondack region of New York following sampling. The important lesson is that the wind does not have to be blowing constantly in the direction of your home to have odors constantly present. The particles from the swine CAFO facilities can be an ever-present source of nuisance for the communities near these facilities.”