It’s time to delve into the VB Flickr Group Pool to choose our favourite of the week.
Once again, there are so many fantastic shots it makes the task of choosing our favourite very hard.
It’s been wonderful driving around the Island and seeing the giant hay straw bales carefully placed across the landscape, so this shot by Jason Grant jumped out at us.
Don’t forget to take a look at Jason’s other shots as well as the rest of the VB Flickr Group Pool.
Sunday, 26th August, 2012 9:04am
By Sally Perry
ShortURL: http://wig.ht/29Zf
Filed under: Awards, Island-wide, Photography
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26.Aug.2012 9:20am
Ahem, as per Jason’s post on FB.
They’re straw bales. Straw is what remains of cereal crops when they’ve been harvested.
Hay is dried grass, which is a way of preserving the peak grass growth for consumption out of season. It was largely replaced by silage in the 1960s-1980s, which is pickled grass, which is what the black plastic covered bales are that you see in fields.
Most all of the above are used by dairy farms. The Island has been fortunate in that it has a mixture of farms, so the dairy farmers buy straw from the arable farmers and use it over-winter to bed their cattle on when it’s too wet for them to be out. The silage and hay are fed to the cattle through the winter.
It’s a nice photo, but it’s not of hay bales, ya townies ;-)
26.Aug.2012 10:04am
Silly me!
26.Aug.2012 9:35pm
Easy mistake to make – most people do!
26.Aug.2012 7:49pm
These straw bales (I call them wheels!) look wonderful, but they look less wonderful once plastified. Moreover, it seems to me that because they are in plastic, barns are less and less used and aloowed to go to rot. One day I hope the plastification will stop and the good old barn will come into use again – that is, if it is still there!