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Best kinda straw!

J

johnlobb

Well-known Member
Local fella started an argument amongst the local philosophers as to the best kind of straw for bedding, wheat or oat straw. What say you?
 
Oat straw is more absorbent. Wheat straw is a bit shiny looking and harder for water to soak in.

Ben
 
Even though they have become environmentally unfriendly, I like plastic straws, I like to kinda chew on them after the drink is done. The new metal and hard plastic are not chewer friendly. Not on subject but when I saw the heading this is what I expected...dumb ole me lol gobble
 
For cattle bedding probably Oat straw would be better. But when your buying all your straw wheat straw is easier to come by in my neck of the woods and usually cleaner. Cleaner means less weed seeds in the manue your spreading on your fields aftwards. I have a friend that raises barley for the straw straw and gets big bucks for it to put in your ponds to kill algae or weeds or whatever it does.
 
Hogs look nice and shiny after they have bedded down in fresh oat straw. Its nice for show hogs. I never worked with wheat straw for hog bedding. Corn stalk bedding is much more absorbent than straw but the hogs dont look as nice after bedding in corn stalk bedding.
 
It depends on what animal your bedding. For hogs and cattle oat straw is more absorbent. For horses you usually use wheat straw as the darn horses will eat the oat straw. Most horse owners do not like that. There is very little oat straw around here anymore. Very few oats grown for grain. Most oats are a nurse or forage crop now.
 
It makes a difference if oat straw is combined/threshed with a rasp bar cylinder or a spike tooth cylinder. A spike tooth breaks up the straw more to opens up the absorbent inside, but looses more material. Rasp bar saves more straw but leaves the waxy coating intact, resulting in more straw bales that are less absorbent.
 
Barley out a walker machine . We feed half straw half hay and when it?s 40 below them cows like that straw better than hay it keeps warm
 
(quoted from post at 20:35:47 08/03/19) The best is rye. Much more absorbent than wheat or oats. Just baled 2500 small squares and a bunch of rounds and big squares. Tom
Click to expand...

I'll vote for rye straw as well, but only because I have a bunch to sell. Otherwise, the best kind of straw is the kind that is on hand. I swathed the neighbor's oats and he got 75 big square bales of oat straw off 31+/- acres. I got 125 big squares and 250ish small squares off 22+/- acres of rye.
 
Way back all the farmers in my area cut dried Broom Sage for bedding to use when sows had pigs in the Winter claimed it was better than straw from a grain.It does make really good mulch for things like tomatoes.
 
Oat/barley /wheat in that order. Wheat isn?t very absorbent but better than nothing. Barley is pretty good but oat is even a little better again.
 
I hate the cardboard straws, they disintegrate before your done drinking. The funny thing is restaurants say plastic one end up in the ocean but when I was on vacation at the beach they all had plastic straws. So I guess straws from Indiana make it to the ocean but the ones from the beach don't?
 
Use paper straws to reduce single use plastics.
Then wrap in it plastic
And stick it in the same plastic cup with the same plastic lid as before.

But hey, we're doing SOMETHING, right???
 
Dad used to have some of each, barley, oats, wheat.
We would feed the cattle plenty of good grass hay, bed them with barley
straw, and they'd eat the barley straw!!!
Never did figure that out!!
 
(quoted from post at 03:17:37 08/04/19) Oat/barley /wheat in that order. Wheat isn?t very absorbent but better than nothing. Barley is pretty good but oat is even a little better again.
Click to expand...

I'd agree, but will take barley over oat because oat dust makes me itch.
 
The market here is large dairy farms and they want cut large bales free of weeds as part of it will go for feed in TMR. Wheat is usual source and getting it dry enough to bale is a problem ,especially with 40' heads on rotary combines floating on ground . This year my straw yield is about 1.3 ton vs 1.6 last year and we have been tedding and raking some of it for over a week after combining. Baleing and hauling the straw costs more than combining and hauling the wheat.
 
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