Where do all the straw bales go?

click photo to enlarge
There was a time, not so many decades ago, when some English farmers burned the straw on the fields after getting in the cereal crop. This environmentally damaging solution to what to do with the left-overs from harvest has long since been banished to history. The fact that it caused dangerous driving conditions on nearby roads was at least as strong an argument as that concerning greenhouse gases. The loss of nutrients provided by the burnt straw notwithstanding, few lament the demise of burning in the fields.

And yet, burning does actually remain one of the ways that straw is used. Over the past couple of years a straw-burning power station has been built and opened near Sleaford, Lincolnshire. There the bales are converted into electricity with considerably fewer environmental consequences than direct burning (though inevitably with some repercussions), and local farmers have an outlet for their "waste". I'd be interested to know the ranges of use to which straw is put today. Animal bedding remains, of course, and some houses (very few actually) have been built using the rectangular bales as wall insulation. A couple of years ago I spoke to a farmer who was selling bales to the Ministry of Defence to use for demolishing some disused fortified buildings by fire! Straw board is still made and used and a proportion of straw is ploughed back into the soil. However, I see veritable mountains of bales dotted around Lincolnshire of which very few look older than a year. One of my tasks this autumn must be to answer this question - "Where do all the straw bales go?"

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Nikon D5300
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 45mm (67mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/800 sec
ISO:100
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Photographic credibility

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If I worried about my credibility as a photographer I'd definitely post fewer photographs. Only my crème de la crème would be on display. Or, I'd select for posting only those that impressed the other photographers and critics who I felt I should be impressing. Those photographs would not necessarily be the same as the ones that I thought my best. I'd also be much more selective of the subjects that I photographed. Flowers and plants would be banished. So too would churches and much historic architecture. Macro shots would disappear along with any subject that didn't have "serious" overtones. The titles of my shots would be enigmatic rather than prosaic, and I'd shoot more black and white and more people. I certainly wouldn't publish "reflections" alongside my images or talk about how I created them. Instead I'd periodically throw out a line or two in impenetrable "artspeak", full of the sort of cryptic jargon in which I'd frame the "artist's statement" that I'd display prominently with my work.

And the last, the very last, thing that I'd do is post a photograph of fluffy ducklings and follow it up with a shot of cute calves penned up in the corner of a Lincolnshire pasture. That would be suicide for my credibility. The only thing I could possibly do worse than that faux pas would be to make the following photograph a shot of baby rabbits eating dandelion flowers. Watch this space.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 32mm
F No: f11
Shutter Speed: 1/160
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -0.67 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Harvest evening

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One of the things that photography does very well is document the past. Yet, inevitably, when the photographs were taken that recorded the world of the past, it was the present. In fact, it's probably true to say that most photographs that we use today to see what the past was like weren't taken with that purpose in mind. The exceptions to this rule include the work of documentary photographers such as recently deceased Jimmy Forsyth (1913-2009) who chronicled a disappearing kind of working class life in North-East England, and also the work of specialists associated with heritage organisations who document buildings, transport, artefacts, etc.

I must say that I've only rarely taken photographs with a view to recording something for posterity, yet I suppose that quite a few of my images could be used in that way. However, two years ago, at the beginning of August, I took the photograph shown above. I took it because it was unusual in showing a method of collecting and transporting straw that seemed to have died out. As I write this piece the combine harvesters are rolling over the Fenland wheat fields, gathering up the seed, depositing the straw in neat lines, and other machines are coming along and converting those rows into multiple, squat, cylindrical bales. That has been the way for many years now, and yet here were these trailers piled up with straw that, for all I know, could have been loaded with pitchforks. It was like a scene from fifty years ago. Swap the wheels for ones with wooden spokes and rims wrapped with steel, and it could be a scene from a hundred years ago. Why this reversion to times past, I thought? Had the baling machine broken down? Was someone shooting a movie that was set in the 1950s? I'll never know, but what I do know is that if this image only existed as a print it would be impossible to date it with any accuracy. As a digital file, of course, it carries its birth certificate wherever it goes!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 11mm (22mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On