Vegetative Environmental Buffers: a low-cost livestock odor mitigation technology
Vegetative Environmental Buffers or VEBs are purposefully planted trees and shrubs usually arranged in linear patterns near and around animal production sites. VEBs have been shown to be biophysically effective in intercepting, filtering and diluting odor-laden air streams associated with animal production sites.
VEB-econ
VEB-econ allows users to locate facilities or future building sites within Google Earth. Users then utilize to-scale dimensional drawing tools to delineate property boundaries, roads, animal buildings and other structures, so as to parameterized idealized tree-row locations. Users specify number of desired tree rows, preferred tree-row protection zones, etc. Layered into the mapping tool is the NRCS SSURGO soil database linking tree species recommendations to soil-based tree suitability recommendations.
VEB-econ estimates total annualized costs for tree establishment, long-term management, any opportunity costs and factors in the potential benefit of utilizing available NRCS EQIP cost-share programming for VEBs.
Vegetative Environmental Buffer Builder and Economic Review: A Decision Support Tool for the Pork Industry; Project #: NPB 13-243. (A Pork Checkoff Funded Research Grant)