If the arc has a wooden floor, sweep and shovel the old straw out weekly.

If the arc has an earthen floor, the straw will be walked and rolled into the ground so you can’t remove it. Instead, you move the arc every month or so, cleaning and disinfecting it at the same time.

If you need to cultivate the ground on which a hut has stood, you’ll need to break up the straw and earth mix by mechanical means or leave it for about two years until the straw has rotted down. Either that, or plant directly into it.

Thanks,
Dave
(yes a newbie!)

If you have southerlies as the prevailing wind, then it’s worth considering a windbreak as well as angling the hut to the east or west.

That’s really pushed straw prices up, but an interesting consequence is that the rise has made straw less cost effective as a fuel — for now!

Last January, prices were £1.50 for small bale straw, 33.94p/l for red diesel and 30.5p/l for heating oil.

Current prices are £2.75 for small bale straw, 50.5p/l red diesel (52.25 from Scottish Fuels!) and 43.5p/l for heating oil.

Last January, it would have cost £15 a day to run a straw-fired boiler for a day, while the equivalent oil cost would have been £20.36 for red diesel and £18.30 for heating oil.

This January, it would cost £27.50 a day to run the straw-fired boiler, while the oil equivalent would be £30.30 for red diesel and £26.10 for heating oil.

If fossil fuel prices rise faster than agricultural/equestrian prices, then straw is going to be sucked into the fuel market. If agricultural/equestrian prices rise faster, straw is going to be sucked back into animal uses.

The same thing is happening with vegetable oil. At the moment, there are a lot of expensive, new biodiesel plants sitting idle or running at low capacity as the food price for vegetable oil is higher than fossil fuel prices.

When fossil fuel prices rise above food prices, then the opposite will happen.

Until things stabilise, which could be a fair way off, then there’s going to be a lot of price instability, supply shortages to one side or the other, and difficult decisions to be made (a straw-fired boiler looked like a good investment this time last year, but looks less so this year; biodiesel plants looked a good bet a year ago, but less so now). And note, I’m only talking in terms of cost effectiveness - I’m deliberately leaving carbon neutrality out of this equation!

Our outbuildings are more 130 years old, so don’t have doorways large enough to get a large round bale through. One hundred small bales, on the other hand, takes up only half the floor area of the hay shed when stacked six deep.

Even if we could fit round bales in, we’d have to roll them out, around the buildings, up the hill, along a track, up the hill some more, and then into the respective pens. Hard work in good weather but in six to eight-inch deep snow or through mud? We take small bales out on a sledge when this happens.

We could store large round bales at the top of the hill, under tarpaulins, but they’d be in a very exposed location. We have sileage up there at the moment and despite being held down with heavy netting, three months of winter gales is shredding the wrap. We’ve even had 8×6 arcs blown over and the roof of a hut blown off — despite being weighed down with a couple of hundredweight of boulders and logs. How long would tarpaulins last and how much rope and ground anchors would be required?

While I can roll a large bale on my own, especially on the flat, the Other Half certainly couldn’t. When I was recovering from my broken collar bone, she did the strawing up and could not have done it with large round bales.

As for numbers, we usually have 20-30 pigs at various stages of development, although we’re enjoying a drop to 15 at the moment. We also have 32 chickens so their five houses and breeding huts also need straw.

Our decisions are never based on cost alone, but on the whole picture.

Is it not cheaper for you to buy round bale straw?
We bought 12 bales off the field for 5 pounds each delivered.
Small bale hay and straw is unfortunately overpriced due to most people with horses using it. We do not have a tractor either and we move them buy hand (roll them) we stored so many inside and the rest outside under tarpaulins and even these have stayed nice and dry. We have 23 sheep, 1 cow, 1 yearling heifer and a 5 week old calf. We bed down every day and still have 6 bales left.