Big Ten rivals may despise Purdue University, but give the school credit for this much: It takes crap seriously.

Purdue students are making extra cash by smelling livestock excrement. Students earn $30 per session as they take whiffs of a variety of smells collected from barns filled with hogs, cows and chickens. It's all in the name of odor research being conducted by a professor of agricultural and biological engineering. Yup, Purdue is a regular Poo U.

I know what every Midwesterner is thinking: These kids are getting paid for something we do for free every day: Smelling the dairy air. Heck, if I received $30 every time I caught a whiff of animal doo, I'd be writing this column from my private island off Grand Cayman.

The students' work provides professor Albert Heber with data for his research on ways to estimate livestock farms' odor emissions. Placing their noses inside an olfactometer, students sniff samples of air that are taken from different locations on farms and then diluted to represent the odors that air would have at various distances from the barn. Heber said the idea is to test different odor-mitigation techniques for effectiveness.

His work has launched a Web site in which people can input variables - such as the type of animal on the farm, the number of animals or how manure is processed - to determine how far odors will travel. The information can be used to decide how close a residence can be to a livestock operation and not be affected by the smells.

Students on doody duty say the extra cash is nothing to sniff at. "Grad students are kind of poor," animal science doctoral student Luca Magnani told The Associated Press. "I've done worse than this." Like what, clearing the fur from Chewbacca's shower drain?

College students, of course, have a proud history of doing whatever it takes to earn a buck. Who among us didn't donate plasma or volunteer as a test subject for experiments or write the star linebacker's term paper on "Pride and Prejudice?" College kids are no less needy today: Those Coldplay ring tone downloads aren't free, you know.

That's why the workers in Purdue's olfactory factory don't mind breathing in odors such as manure, hay and farm waste. "The only thing that is good is that we are not smelling it for a long time. It's just a sniff," civil engineering graduate student Anuj Sharma said.

"It gets a little intense, but since I go out and collect a lot of the samples, it's not that bad," said Sam Hanni, a research assistant for Heber. "It's nothing really strong that would bother you."

Spoken like true Midwesterners. A little stench hardly fazes the hardy folk around these parts. We're No. 1 when it comes to dealing with No. 2.

That's why a Big Ten school like Purdue is an ideal place for excrement experiments. Sallie Fahey, executive director of the Tippecanoe County Area Plan Commission, said having data that shows how nearby residents might be affected could lessen the tension between farmers seeking to build livestock operations and neighbors worried about the smell. "If it's an area that's a little close to where there has been a development ... that's when it tends to be contentious," Fahey said.

Yes, that's when the crud hits the fan. Midwesterners try to avoid such confrontations because we are a polite, reserved lot. We strive to be good neighbors, the type who would alert you if there were a portion of cow pie stuck to the bottom of your shoe so you could discreetly remove it.

Of course, we might ask to smell it first.