Hi, I am new to the forum but enjoying it very much, learning and hoping to be able to contribute also. This was in our morning paper and I thought some would find it interesting. "Musher Joe Redington Jr., of Manley, loads a bale of bedding straw in Fairbanks this week after paying $19.99 for a 70 pound bale shipped from the Lower 48. A poor growing season and early snow here has sresulted in a severe shortage of straw. We will be looking at alternative bedding for our animals this winter for sure. Ravens Roost Farm in Alaska Maureen

-- Maureen Stevenson (maureen@mtaonline.net), October 05, 2000

Answers

Paying $3 from the farm Coop. delivered along with feed. Thought that was too high for more or less waste from grain harvest. From field is much less. Wish I could bring you a truck load at that price! Lets see---17 bucks profit X a load of 600 bales. I think I could buy fuel with that!

-- Don (dairyagri@yahoo.com), October 05, 2000.

My guy charged me $3.50 a bale. I was surprised because I also thought it was grain waste. I used it to bed down my goat and found that my horse was eating it. I also usually use it for the rabbits houses in the winter. It's cheaper to use regular hay. By the way, this is the worst time to buy bales because every city person is buying them to decorate their lawns for Halloween. The places charge $6-8 a bale!

-- Dee (gdgtur@goes.com), October 05, 2000.

I paid $1 to $1.50 in central ohio for your load staw. The last straw I bought a couple of weeks ago was $1.25 but I only bought 20 bales. About the only place around here thats charging $3 is Quality farm or TSC and most of what they sell is going home in the back of SUV in single bale quanity.

-- Gary (gws@redbird.net), October 05, 2000.

Maureen, ouch! Those prices do seem terribly high, but I'm sure that shipping is what most of the cost is.

Here in Kansas where I'm at, straw bales sell for $1.50 to $2 each, but I'm not sure that they are as large as 70 pounds.

We have a local company that produces building material sheets from wheat straw. I've not seen one, but I understand they are about like particle board. The bales that they buy are typically the large square bales that are 4' X 4' X 8'. I don't know if they buy the large round ones.

While a lot of us think of straw as being a waste product, it is in fact not. Think of a farm as an oversized garden. Would we not want to work all of the organic matter available back into the soil, or mulch with it?

Straw helps with the tilth of the soil as well as providing nutrients. Successfull Small-Scale Farming by Karl Schwenke shows that removing the straw from a wheat field that yielded 30 bushels per acre of grain, takes away 1.6 tons of the straw which contains 46.0 pounds of Phosphoric Nitrogen (N), 4.16 pounds of Acid (P2O5), 23.68 pounds of Potash (K2O), and 6 pounds of Lime (CaO).

When we remove the nutrients via the straw, to maintain yield of future crops we must replace it with chemical fertilizers or other means. Chemical fertilizers do cost, but the loss of the organic matter is of more concern to me. Many farmers around the area I live in burn the stubble from their fields. We live in a sandy soil area, and I cringe when I see this. To destroy the water holding ability of this straw rather than put it back into the soil really upsets me.

Many farmers are turning to no-tillage methods of production, but of course chemicals are used to control vegetation. This farming method is also sometimes called "trash farming" because you must plant through heavy residues, etc. Yields are greatly increased and soils are improved over a few years time.

Bottom line, straw is far from a crop waste and is quite valuable in more ways than one.

-- Notforprint (Not@thekeyboard.com), October 05, 2000.

I just ordered 25 bales of straw from a local farmer at $2.50 each, and he will deliver them. The price has pretty much stayed the same for the last few years. I'm in upstate NY - Saratoga Springs area.

-- bluetick (coonhound@mindspring.com), October 05, 2000.

We don't buy much straw, but I saw it going for $4.00 a bale a few weeks back. Hay on the other hand, sells for anywhere from 50 cents to $2.50 a bale, depending on how close to town you buy it. I usually only use hay, and what I can't trade off of my buddy, I pick up along the road sides (I use it for bedding). Amazing how many people won't stop to pick it up, or even come back for it, once it falls off. Or who won't buy a busted bale either. That's another source of cheap hay for me. I can sometime get the hay 50% to 75% off the asking price of a whole bale!

-- Eric in TN (ems@nac.net), October 05, 2000.

$1.50 if I pick it up or $2.00 delivered. We used 660 bales of it to build our house.

-- Doug Shutes (Toadshutes@yahoo.com), October 05, 2000.

Hmmm...I haven't bought any recently but normally pay $3-4 per 65lb bale. It's pretty steep which is why I buy very little. I use mostly wood shavings when I need bedding and that works much better, altho it's not cheap either. During foaling season straw can cost a bundle in this area. I normally try to buy my staw well before my mare comes due and then use the minimum by having a 'foaling stall' set up and not using it until I am fairly certian that birth is near. Usually I only need straw for a few days this way and after the foal is a day or two old I switch to shavings.

I'm glad to hear someone else also picks up 'stray' bales! If at all possible I'll pull over and pick up bales that someone else has dropped.

-- Elle (hotging@aol.com), October 05, 2000.

I just bought a few bails of wheat straw for bedding & paid $2.50 a bail & we picked it up. Sonda in Ks.

-- Sonda (sgbruce@birch.net), October 05, 2000.

It can't be bought here except for a few very expensive bales at Halloween for decoration. I do have a student whose father occasionaly gives me a couple of bales. We trade alot of things that way. I much prefer straw for bedding because it composts so well. Otherwise it's pine shavings at over $4.00 a bag. They do not compost well. Takes forever to break down.

-- Cheryl Cox (bramblecottage@hotmail.com), October 06, 2000.

If you buy one bale around here (northern WI) it's $4. If you order a semi load, it works out more like $2, but they aren't anywhere near 70 lbs! They're too bulky and too expensive for use even here except for foaling mares -- otherwise we use planed shavings of pine, by product of lumber mills...I think the going rate is something like $400 for an entire semi trailer load, loaded, delivery extra. If you buy it in little bales, it's cost prohibitive. Try small sawmills in your area, if you load it, they may let you take it for free, unless they're burning it to fuel the sawmill. Don't take any that haven't been stored dry. Another alternative is if you have access to a LOT of newspapers and a chipper/shredder -- I've heard of people bedding their animals on that, altho it leaves their feet grey from the ink -- and you have to make sure it's soybean ink and not a petrochemical so you don't poison the animals. The upside is none of them eat it. Come to that, none of the animals eat the wood shavings either.

-- Julie Froelich (firefly1@nnex.net), October 06, 2000.

Straw standing in the paddock/field/whatever is waste. As stated, incorporated back in the ground it has value. However, it is basically cellulose and lignin, and dry - like seasoned wood (which is a good reason for using it as a building material). That means it breaks down fairly slowly, and the organisms doing the job take nitrogen out of the soil while they're doing it, so you can't grow a crop until that's done unless you add mucho nitrogenous fertiliser.

However, what begins to cost money is cutting and baling and storing and distributing and a fair profit for all of that. Retailing on a one-off basis will be expensive, and then you always get the types who want MUCH more than a fair profit - the Nicholas van Rijn's of the produce and garden markets (if you read SF).

-- Don Armstrong (darmst@yahoo.com.au), October 06, 2000.

We paid .80 cents per bale this summer. Minimum 50 bales. We bought much more though. As they baled it in the field, we followed picking it up. This was government property, so I assumed the farmers were being contracted and the sale of the straw was not the only revenue source. We are in Missouri. Typically you can expect to pay from $1.50 - $2.00 per bale. God Bless! Wendy

-- Wendy@GraceAcres (wjl7@hotmail.com), October 06, 2000.

In our area, central PA, straw goes from $2 to $4 a bale, depends on who you buy it from, we get it from a farmer down the road for $2 per bale.

-- Phyllis (almostafarm@yahoo.com), October 06, 2000.

At the local co-op, about $6/bale if bought by individual square bale. Local feed companies will sell it for ~$4/bale if you buy in quantity. Probably could get it for slightly less if you didn't have it delivered. I think it's overpriced, but then, I think hay is overpriced around here too.

-- sheepish (rborgo@gte.net), October 06, 2000.

I don't think the high cost of straw in Alaska is shipping costs. When we lived in Tok, we could have gotten a truckload of alfalfa for $300/ton shipped up. That comes to a lot less than $19.99/bale! We used shavings or sawdust for bedding when we were up there, as it is produced locally and is a lot cheaper. Though the goats bedded themselves with their hay! (Locally grown, $170/ton)

-- Kathleen Sanderson (stonycft@worldpath.net), October 06, 2000.

Dear Neighbor: Everyone is scrambling down here at DJ. Not only for straw but as you know, for hay.too. The last cuttings were under constant rain which turned into sevral inches of snow. Farmers next to us are literally scraping it up, snow and all, and bailing it. It is a serious situation. We paid 7.99 recently for old bales which still had baling wire on them. Now we must follow Joey...if there is any? We need a ton. Hay is desperate. Kathleen, we paid 260 a ton for our last two tons...hoped to get more as the crops looked wonderful but are now ruined. I did comment to my husband, "How long can our animals chew on birch bark and live. God Bless, and pray you find some straw and or hay.

-- Norma Lucas (trooper806@webv.net), October 06, 2000.

Norma, this won't do you much good this year, I'm afraid, but maybe next year . . . friends of ours in Tok (in their fifties, and with some health problems) used to cut their own hay from along the roadsides, by hand with a scythe, and pitchfork it into their one-ton truck with stock0racks. I think they took it home to dry it there. They also cut aspen branches and dried them for their goats. The only feed they had to buy was grain for the goats and chickens. You might be able to find people with small acreages and no equipment for harvesting their own hay who would let you mow their property this way. It is time-consuming, but actually not all that hard of work. As for this year -- what animals are you feeding? If you can keep the hay-plus-snow frozen, it will probably be all right, though I would think not the best quality, as it seems late. If you have goats, they will eat all kinds of branches and twigs -- may not produce a lot of milk, but it would keep them alive. Might be best off, though, to buy bags of alfalfa pellets, and supplement your poor hay with that -- it can't be much more than what you are already paying for a ton of hay, even if it is shipped in! But get your whole winter's worth now, before gas prices go up any more than they already have!

-- Kathleen Sanderson (stonycft@worldpath.net), October 07, 2000.

Maureen, I don't know where you are in Alaska, but I know of some frozen hay in Salcha, and someone else in Fairbanks that still has nice hay for $4/bale. A friend of mine with sled dogs just bought some last years hay for $2.50 to bed her dogs and avoid buying straw. This doesn't make very good bedding for hay eaters, but worth looking into for sheep, cattle or goats. Lumber mills don't charge too much for shavings, but this is awful for sheep if you're raising them for wool. My sheep tend to make their own straw but I got this wonderful Timothy this year and they are eating every scrap! Glad I don't have sled dogs anymore. Good Luck, Jill

-- Jill Schreiber (schreiber@alaska.com), October 08, 2000.