File talk:Round hay bale at dawn02.jpg
- Note
- This image shows straw, not hay. Look at the yellow stalks between all the little green plants. This is a field, not a meadow with grass (hay).
- Correction
- This image does indeed show a hay bale. Straw comes from wheat stalks, this is not a wheat field. Hay comes from grass or alfalfa. The "little green plants" you refer to is alfalfa.
- Correction to correction
- This image is of a straw bale, not a bale of hay. Hay is a food source and comes from a variety of nutritional grasses, not just alfalfa. It's cut when it's still alive and full of grain. Straw, on the other hand, is hollow stalks of previously harvested grains. It's used for animal bedding and to cover crops in the winter. The easiest way to tell the difference between hay and straw is by color: Hay is green and straw is yellow. It doesn't matter that this particular bale happens to be sitting in a field of alfalfa. The farmer may be placing bales here preparing to cover his crops for the winter.
- Explanation
This image is of a round hay bale that has been sun-bleached. Straw is brighter yellow and larger-stemmed. Also, in the case of straw, the entire field will be the same color as the bale due to the condition of the crop at harvest. Here, we have a green field and visible non-grain plants. Hay only stays green after being baled on the inside of the bale or if its stored inside. It very quickly bleaches out to this color after just a few weeks. My guess is that the hay is a grass-alfalfa blend, when hay is cut, the grass stalks dry out pretty fast (that's the yellow you see in the field) while the alfalfa rebounds much faster and, with larger leaf area, stays greener too.
To answer the comment above, round hay bales weigh over 1000 lbs each, no one will move them any more than they have to, certainly not randomly to place them in a different field and NO ONE covers a big hay field with straw in the winter! The bales are scattered like this because that's where they came out of the baler and have yet to be picked up and taken in to be stacked or shipped. This is actually quite common in dry areas; while bales have to be moved to allow the next cutting of hay to grow, round bales that are kept for the landowner's own livestock sometimes are left sitting out in a field for months after the final cutting because they are such a hassle to move. They bleach out pretty fast. Montanabw (talk) 21:42, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
