Moose asked ...
> I thought I understood this stuff, at least broadly: hay is the whole
> plant, straw the stalks left after the grain is harvested. Alfalfa is
> always hay?
>
> Hay is livestock feed, straw for lining stalls, protecting spectators,
> building houses, and so on. A quick web look shows this to be largely true
> in that straw has very limited use as feed.
>
> So why roll up straw? It sure looks like it would make it much less useful
> for most of the things I'd think it is useful for. Hay, sure, and the idea
> of holders for it in the field mentioned in this thread does sound good.
>
> I'm sure I must be missing something. Please, farm boys, enlighten me.
>
> Straw Loss Moose
I stand ready to be corrected - but my understanding is that cattle-beasts aka
cows and bulls
and steers and heifers , due to their complicated (4-chamber?) stomachs at
least one of
which contains bacteria which can actually break down the nearly pure cellulose
of those
stalks into sugars and what-not, this actually is acceptable fodder for
wintertime.
Their massive mouths and molars can cheerfully crush the stalks without getting
hurt -
compared with sheep which would not bother with such rough stuff. Also many of
the
beasties being fed this straw are not pregnant (cf over-wintering ewes which
will be) so will
not have other special nutritional requirements.
Bison must have also lived during winter on whatever grass straw they could
find on the
frozen prairies, by the same process.
The baling process also gets the straw off the fields from which it would
otherwise have to be
burned in order to cut short the life-cycle of wheat-inhabiting rust-fungi ... !
A little language-aside note. The word fodder is one of the few words in
English which
carries forward the German and Dutch practice of of having one word for a human
activity
and another similar one for the equivalent animal activity.
Food for humans, fodder for animals, as in fodder-beet. Beet for animal food.
In German, humans 'essen' (eat) food, animals 'fressen' it.
Which leads to the derogatory term 'kilometer fressen" or dangerous motorway
speedsters..
Humans driving like sub-human animals.
Lesson over ... back to normal activity. Now that I have regurgitated that
stuff from the
recesses of my mind perhaps I can purge it ...
Brian Swale
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