Straw shortage means price rises and drop in use as bedding

There are many reasons for this year’s shortage, with the wet weather playing a big role. 

Modern varieties of high-yielding cereals have shorter straw to help them stand up to heavy wind and rain. In addition, the volume of straw grown this year is down by about 30 per cent in some areas as a result of poorer growing conditions.

Then there was the wet weather at harvest. As crops become weathered the straw shrinks in volume, rather like a woollen garment can do after washing. Even after combining it continues to shrink in the rows, or swathes as we call them, in a wet spell, particularly if it is then worked-up in a good day to speed up the drying process ready for baling. There have been few opportunities for that this autumn, and there are countless fields with wet straw lying that might never be baled.

That’s another of the snags of straw from an arable farmer’s perspective – valuable dry days are needed to get it baled before the fields can be cleared to allow the next crop to be sown. That uses men and machinery at a busy time.

At one time straw was simply burnt in the swathe. A good burn was not only a quick and easy way to clear the fields it also helped to reduce weeds. 

The downside of straw-burning was that there was a risk of accidents as billowing smoke drifted across roads. It also caused unacceptable smoke and ash pollution for those living nearby. 

So a law was passed banning straw-burning that forced farmers to look at other methods of disposal like baling it or incorporating it into the soil. 
Modern combines can have mechanisms fitted at their rear that chop the straw and spread it on the land. Close on half of the UK’s annual straw output is incorporated into the soil where it breaks down to become a source of plant nutrients.

Other pressures on supply include rising demand from small energy bio-digesters, which comes on top of the 800,000 tonnes of straw purchased each year to fuel power plants.

As the cost of straw has risen over the years, livestock farmers have increasingly used it as cattle fodder rather than bedding, where it ends up as farmyard manure, or muck.

The use of straw for bedding is now more-or-less confined to lambing and calving pens, or in arable areas where there is an abundant supply on farms and the muck is valued.

Livestock farmers in the west, where straw is scarcer and more expensive, have developed other ways of keeping their cattle clean and dry during the winter.

My grandfather’s generation tied their cattle up by the neck with chains in stalls in byres. 

Dung and urine was deposited in the “grip” – a channel a little wider than the width of a shovel – at the back of the cattle between their stalls and the byre passageway. That muck, and any that the cattle had inadvertently deposited on the bed of their stall, was swept up, shovelled into a wheelbarrow and taken to the midden. 

Often as not that wheelbarrow had to be pushed up slippery midden-planks so that its contents could be tipped on top of an ever-increasing pile. A simple slip often led to a headlong dive into a morass of unpleasantness.

Nowadays many have opted to loose-house their cattle in cubicle sheds, where they come and go as they please and lie down in individual stalls, or cubicles as and when they wish. 

Their muck is deposited in passageways at the rear of the cows between the rows of cubicles to be either scraped away by automatic scarpers pulled by chains, or mounted on small tractors.

Others keep young-stock and beef cattle in slatted sheds where the cattle lie on a floor made of concrete panels with slits in them. The dung and urine falls through the slits into tanks below that store it for use in the spring.

Straw is too valuable to waste as bedding.