[GSBN] Baling thoughts

[RT]

On Tue, 03 Feb 2009

>>  <markj at redfeather.org> wrote:
>>> I was in a meeting yesterday with a man who would like to see
>>> sustainable housing in his home land of Kenya. He mentioned that
>>> they grow a lot of wheat and rice there, however he asked if I had
>>> heard of baling sugar cane or corn stalks.

john rehorn <rehorn at frontier.net>
>>  Any bale will mildew, rot and  possibly be a source of spontaneous
>>  combustion no matter what plant  material it is made of.


I agree with the bits about rot and mildew but would disagree with the bit  
about
spontaneous combustion.

When hay bales spontaneously combust, it's a result of too-green ("green"  
as in the firewood sense of not being properly seasoned yet as opposed to  
being wetted by external moisture sources) hay being baled and stacked in  
a honking-big mass -- exactly the same thing that would happen if you took  
freshly cut grass and heaped it into a big pile.

The moist, green, nitrogen-rich material begins composting -- an  
exothermic reaction -- and you'll see steam rising (and possibly smoke if  
conditions are right) from the pile and if you stick your hand into it,  
you'll note that it is HOT.

Straw bales (ie bedding material), lacking the more vegetative leaf (ie  
higher nitrogen content) portion that would otherwise make it "hay" (ie  
feed material) is unlikely to compost rapidly enough to spontaneously  
combust.

In farming country, whenever one hears of a hay barn fire, you'll see  
knowing looks exchanged, looks that say "The irresponsible/careless farmer  
knew better than to rush it and put the hay away too green", but nobody  
actually says it because everybody already knows how carelessly their  
neighbour runs their operation and they don't bad-mouth their neighbours  
(or at least that's the case in the farming communities in which I've  
lived).

I don't think that I'd want to try baling corn or sugar cane stalks any  
more than I'd want to try baling bamboo culms.

When the stuff gets to that size, it resembles small trees (ie "sticks")  
more than it does the dinky straw stalks of grasses.

	(I know this only too well after snowshoeing yesterday through a
	cornfield buried in snow and being pulled to the ground and trapped
	by the submerged ends of still-standing corn stalks that got stuck
	in the holes of the deck at the tail end of the snowshoes,
	rendering me as helpless as an animal caught in a leg-hold trap.
        (Wouldn't have happened if I'd been wearing the old-fashioned
        wood/hide babiche snowshoes rather than the newfangled
        aluminum tubing/plastic deck type). I've never been trapped by  
grass or hay stalks.)

I think that I'd look at bundling those corn or sugar cane stalks whole,  
and use the bundles
log-like (if the sugar content of the cane or stalks doesn't pose any  
great risk for potential insect attack.

Of if bales are preferred, I think that they'd need to be run through a  
chipper first, and then baled in mesh "sacks" like those that were used in  
the CMHC proof of concept study done years ago (see "BioBloc") where wood  
waste was baled/stacked/plastered over in the same fashion as straw  
bales.  The reseacher had intially planned to mix up the wood chips with  
an earthen mix to make building blocks but after preliminary explorations,  
decided to omit the earthen mix and just go with the "baled chips in a  
sack" approach.

-- 
=== * ===
Rob Tom
Kanata, Ontario, Canada
< A r c h i L o g i c  at  ChaffY a h o o  dot  C a >
(manually winnow the chaff from my edress in your reply)
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