Wet Straw for our Bales.. :'(

We honestly feel like we’ve been hit with the worst luck. Every single time we’ve gone to bale with the farmer, the skies have opened and we’ve had to stop. We were due to bale today, but again the rain came.

It’s so disheartening, especially as we’re about to start our very first strawbale build and we know how important it is to have dry bales from the start. We’re living off-grid as a family in southern Bulgaria, and this build is a big step for us.

Has anyone else run into this problem? Do you have any advice for getting ahead of the weather, or tips for making sure the bales we do manage to get are properly dry and suitable for building?

Any thoughts or shared experiences would mean a lot right now.

Kayleigh and Phil
@offgridwiththeudens

That is a bummer for sure.

Here in the USA, we have a national weather internet site which gives us a 7 day forecast.

Does Bulgaria not have something similar?

Annoyingly the forecasts haven't been too accurate and we are reliant on the local farmer and his availability.

Hopefully we can bale next week. It's quite a rollercoaster of emotions isn't it?

Just an observation, though it seems your local farmer is only available when it is going to rain ...

From what you said:

Kayleigh said, Every single time we’ve gone to bale with the farmer, the skies have opened and we’ve had to stop. We were due to bale today, but again the rain came

I am curious do you pay him every time it rains?

This is our first build here. We are originally from the UK and moved to Bulgaria. We are negotiating a language barrier and also many logistical issues - so it's quite a challenge even without the rain!

What is the difference in the price between having a farmer bale the hay vs buying already baled hay?

Not much difference - however we want it baled as compressed as possible which they do not do here for the conventional bale. The farmer will be using the highest setting on his baler for ours.

Are you talking about straw, ie the left-overs of a cereal crop? Or hay? Which is a crop in itself.

I know in the UK it was almost impossible to guarantee the hay harvest if you were dependent on anyone else for the baling equipment. We would manage it most years if we had all our own, but it was still a race against time if a few good days of sunshine were forecast to get it cut, turned and baled before the rain came back.

In Portugal it's easier - you cut at the end of May and bring it in as required over the next month or so before fire season starts. If it rains, just leave it to dry out again.

It's all very weather dependent!

Not sure I can add anything but an observation. Here in the U.S. there's an established market for straw bales so farmers who want to do something with this "by-product" need to keep it dry. After the grain is harvested and the straw cut and baled it's often stacked under tarps in the field, or moved to a nearby barn. It's likely that there's a similar demand for straw in other places. If you can locate farmers who sell into that market there's some chance they have dry straw bales available. Here it's used for animal bedding, mulch, and erosion control, increasingly it's becoming feedstock for straw panel board, and much of it is shipped overseas for manufacturing.

In the arid western U.S. where the dry season months of June - September coincide with the grain harvest we take advantage of the "dry weather window" to get straw bale walls stacked. There's a joke shared among straw bale builders here: "if you want it to rain, build straw bale walls without first having a roof overhead."

I mostly worked on non-load bearing (post and beam) buildings and tried to have a completed roof over the walls before stacking bales. The handful of times I departed from that precaution--usually because of scheduling issues with roofers or roofing material delays--it never failed to rain!

In S. Oregon it has been a sure fire way to end a drought!

Jim
Many Hands Builders

Here in midwest it is common practice to have someone with the equipments to cut and bale the hays and pay half the bales. Is it the same way in other places? The farmer should have better motivation to make quality bales since he's taking them too.