Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

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Open Access Thesis

Keywords

Confinement farms--Location--Iowa--Black Hawk County; Confinement farms--Location--Iowa--Grundy County; Geographic information systems--Iowa--Black Hawk County; Geographic information systems--Iowa--Grundy County; Geographic information systems; Iowa--Black Hawk County; Iowa--Grundy County; Academic theses;

Abstract

Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) are becoming increasingly common on the Iowa landscape. These structures produce a very large number of livestock in a small area. The production of livestock is essential to the economy of Iowa, creating billions of dollars in revenue. However, when production is confined to small areas, large amounts of byproducts are produced that can cause a threat to the environment surrounding the areas of production. Thus, there is a need for careful planning, particularly the selection of suitable locations for future CAFO development. Currently, locations for CAFOs are simply chosen according to a producer's preference and are restricted by state of Iowa guidelines. There is little decision support available to producers to aid them in selecting an appropriate location. Additionally, there is no mechanism available for producers to study how air pollution emanates from a proposed facility and impacts the neighborhood adjacent to the facility. This research has developed a decision support tool to aid CAFO managers and producers in selecting appropriate locations for animal confinements, and also assists in understanding how air pollution impacts the neighborhood of a proposed facility. This decision support tool was created using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), and is embedded within an industry standard geographic information system (GIS). While this tool can be implemented for any county in Iowa, for this thesis project, case studies using data from two Iowa counties were used. These counties include Black Hawk and Grundy. The tool is comprised of three components: a setback analysis to aid in determining legal locations for confinements, a multi-criteria evaluation tool that helps determine different scenarios for the most appropriate location of an animal confinement, and an odor plume analysis tool to assist in understanding how odors from a proposed facility may affect the surrounding neighborhood. The tool is demonstrated using data from one rural and one urban county in the state of Iowa. The demonstration shows how the tools are useful for determining suitability at a location-specific level, and a countywide level as well. The tools have been developed with easy to use interfaces that give novice users the ability to perform advanced GIS processes for analyzing site suitability. The current tool has few limitations that include non-availability of data such as private wells, and the format of existing data. Furthermore, this research has lacked the field testing required to determine the accuracy of the model using actual conditions experienced in the field. Future directions for this research include field testing of the model to determine model accuracy, and the development of a data collection tool to help users generate data for the application in cases where accurate data is not available.

Year of Submission

2005

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Department of Geography

First Advisor

Ramanathan Sugumaran

Second Advisor

Thomas Fogarty

Third Advisor

Alan Czarnetzki

Comments

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this thesis and wish to have it removed from the Open Access Collection, please submit a request to scholarworks@uni.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL.

Date Original

2005

Object Description

1 PDF file (105 leaves)

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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