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The overall objective of this study was to examine the air quality differences between deep pit and shallow pit swine finishing buildings, accounting for various practices and building characteristics controlled by management. Additionally, we wanted to identify if there is a continued need for sampling at both the inlet and exhaust locations on each building. Air samples were collected at air inlets and at an exhaust fan from 26 swine finishing buildings in early summer, 2000, and evaluated by both sensory (dynamic olfactometry) and analytical (gas chromatography (GC)) means. Barn conditions and management data were also collected. We found that deep pit systems had higher odor concentrations in air emitted even having accounted for pig inventories, dustiness, barn cleanliness, problems with dunging and temperature. Combining results from our study with costs of strategies to improve dustiness, cleanliness and dunging patterns will establish a relative value of these strategies to control odor. Also, we saw that air inlet odor concentration measured by olfactometry was dependent on farm, building within farm, and panelist. This suggests that inlet sampling is important if the objective is to characterize the building as a potential source of odor emissions. We found that correlations between olfactometry and GC results were very low with very clean/low odor samples, but were higher for more odorous samples. Further analyses are necessary to determine if either measurement might serve reasonably well as a quantitative measurement reflective of odor for high odor emitting farms.