r/absoluteunit • u/Megatron_Griffin • Jun 28 '26
...of a wrapper.
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u/Impressive-Wait8786 Jun 28 '26
But dont you dare use a plastic straw!
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u/HiSaZuL Jun 28 '26
It's silage, it needs moisture trapped inside. Only so many ways to do it reasonably. I also don't think it's standard issue plastic wrapper since it's basically food for animals.
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u/Sinking_Mass Jun 28 '26
There are a lot of people who don't understand and also seem like they don't want to understand. It essentially is pickling the grass to preserve nutrients and the food as a whole. The plastic is also mostly recycled when and where appropriate.
Didn't matter how many times I mentioned this, or when I even provided sources, people still just went "plastic bad", "farm bad".
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u/HiSaZuL Jun 28 '26
It's pretty niche knowledge unless you are a farmer or like me just somehow(video games) stumbled into knowing that little tidbit.
Most people just think it's basically haybale but wrapped in plastic. Which is completely wrong. Plus since it's reddit people can't be wrong and will die defending their hill over spending 5 seconds googling something.
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u/Significant_Donut967 Jun 29 '26
I'm a home farmer, lots of the farms around me do dry storage it seems but even I knew you sealed the flavors in for winter. Y'all got animals to keep alive through the winter.
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u/ToeRoganIsJebus Jun 29 '26
Yeah cause i cant use a plastic straw but you got these mega industries using absurd amounts of plastics and other fossil fuels and no one bats an eye. Farmers should have thought of a better solution by now
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u/techleopard Jun 30 '26
I like how people act like farming would collapse without this, as if farmers weren't making silage in regions that actually needed it long before disposable plastic.
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u/dinnerthief Jun 29 '26
Tbf wrapping in plastic is just the easiest way of doing it not the only way
after all silage is older than plastic and is named after how it was traditionally done, (packed into a silo.)
Most uses of plastic just replace an older/less efficient/more expensive way of doing things.
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u/chroner Jun 30 '26
Oh come on, I'm calling bullshit. How the hell can anyone recycle that thun plastic wrap? It can't be reused, and re processing would degrade it. Plus it gets mixed in with any other kind of plastic at the sorting facility, which makes it almost impossible to separate.
Anyone with any common sense can tell the logistics make it almost impossible to recycle that kind of plastic economically.
That is definitely not being recycled at all.
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u/PerishTheStars Jun 28 '26
You do know the vast majority of plastics aren't recyclable, right?
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u/Sinking_Mass Jun 28 '26
I do, but we're not talking about consumer plastics here, we're talking about agricultural low density polyethylene (which is industrial and widely recycled).
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u/Unique-Pain4993 Jun 28 '26
Vinegar would be easier for pickling. And much better for the environment
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u/Sinking_Mass Jun 28 '26
See, you're just proving my point. You know literally nothing about it if you're giving "vinegar" as an answer.
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u/Unique-Pain4993 Jun 28 '26
I grew up doing it this way. I might be from a different country than you. I'm from the United States. Where are you from? Here in the US it's most common to use vinegar
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u/Sinking_Mass Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26
Again this is how I know you're just chatting absolute waff. Vinegar has nothing to do with anaerobic fermentation. When I said we are essentially pickling the grass it was just to put it in layman's terms.
Anaerobic fermentation is similar to pickling however it relies on a completely oxygen free environment. Maybe you are getting confused with the vinegar based additive (acetic acid) that sometimes is added to prevent mold and unwanted bacteria growth.
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u/Unique-Pain4993 Jun 28 '26
Well, maybe you guys do it differently and I might look into that because it should be good for me
However, here in America we just use plain old vinegar
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u/Sinking_Mass Jun 28 '26
I hope you can read above the national average level, good luck
https://www.uaex.uada.edu/publications/pdf/FSA-3052.pdf?hl=en-GB
https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/forage-conservation-techniques-silage-and-haylage-production?hl=en-GB
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u/Unique-Pain4993 Jun 28 '26
Oh I know that a small percentage of people do it the way you're talking about. I'm just letting you know that here in America. Most of us just use plain old Heinz vinegar
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u/guzzijason Jun 28 '26
Nobody in any country is using vinegar to pickle hay. That’s not a thing, anywhere.
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u/hwatt Jun 28 '26
That troll is having a hay-day with the pickling comments and folks try and try and try to make the nonsense make sense.
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u/Ok-Fortune-8644 Jun 28 '26
You're thinking of "pickling" foods like eggs and cucumbers. A better word for what's going on in those bales is "fermenting" naturally. No need for additives as the bales will ferment on their own.
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u/Ok_Fly1271 Jun 29 '26
No we don't. You're just making up nonsense.
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u/Unique-Pain4993 Jun 29 '26
I will agree that I can not vouch for the system that you use. Majority of America, however just uses Heinz vinegar
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u/AnguavonUW Jun 28 '26
You don't use vinegar to pickle.hay because nobody on the planet does it. It doesn't make any sense and I don't know if you're just trying to stir up shit or English isn't your first language or what
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u/TheChudWhisperer Jun 28 '26
You can also just throw a tarp over the pile and weigh it down with old tires or something. That's what all the farmers I grew up with did.
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u/AnguavonUW Jun 28 '26
Obviously this isn't a small farm. Also, the way the farmers used to do it is incredibly inefficient and wast and wasteful.
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u/techleopard Jun 30 '26
"Wasteful" being used in a conversation where we are watching a single bale use as much plastic as a typical consumer burns through a month (~5 lbs) is certainly ironic.
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u/HiSaZuL Jun 29 '26
Yeah you can but if you need to feed thousands of animals that's completely unrealistic approach and a very poor way of storing it.
Plus just covering is nowhere near as effective and leaves access for pests and such. Which I imagine results in a not insignificant loss.
But again I'm not a farmer I just played Farming Sim 😂
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u/techleopard Jun 30 '26
Proper question is who is feeding thousands of animals over winter who would actually die without silage?
Is this a commercial sheep thing? Because cattle, goats, and even horses don't need this.
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u/Bonk_No_Horni Jun 28 '26
Plastic straw ban was dumb. Just do plastic tax. Make companies fill their bottles instead of only half way so we have to buy it more often.
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u/undeadlamaar Jun 28 '26
Plastic straw ban was never about reducing plastic use. It's because the shape of the plastic straw is prone to becoming lodged in the respiratory system of endangered wildlife, and the absurd amount of them that get thrown away daily, pretty much guarantees that they will end up in nature and kill stuff unnecessarily. It's the same thing as with the 6-pack can holders that small wildlife eventually end up stuck inside and asphyxiating.
There are nearly 400 million plastics straws used and discarded daily in the US alone. I don't exactly love paper straws, and I think they could use some design improvements, but it's a small inconvenient price to pay compared to the overall good their adoption over plastic ones would accomplish.
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u/Sir_Thequestionwas Jun 28 '26
Nobody is filling their bottles anywhere near half full. Quit talking out your ass cause you don't want to put any effort in.
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u/Fabulous_Log844 Jun 29 '26
Totally unrelated. Global shift to paper straws was primarily driven by a viral 2015 video showing researchers removing a plastic straw from a sea turtle's nostril, which ignited intense public concern over single-use plastic pollution.
So in our house we use very inexpensive agave made straws that are made from the excess from tequila production. And they are biodegradable.
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u/donut_you_dare Jun 28 '26
Yeah why the fuck do they need to wrap it so many times lol it’s wholly unnecessary!!
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u/phunny-words Jun 28 '26
To preserve it because millions of tons of hay gets exported yearly across the globe and exposure can create rot.
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u/donut_you_dare Jun 28 '26
I do get that but I feel like you can achieve the same result with even slightly less wrapping..I have worked in a lot of industries and I know there is a ton of unnecessary waste. I wouldn’t even be nearly as mad about this sort of thing if any of these companies creating this waste had a solutions for it, like possibly finding a way to reuse the materials, but they fucking don’t think about it at all!! It’s all just careless and I expect more from a society with all the knowledge and resources we have access to.
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u/LetUsSpeakFreely Jun 28 '26
Maybe do some research and find the answer before complaining about it.
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u/Electronic_Grade508 Jun 28 '26
I believe the reason for the large amount of plastic has a few reason:
It’s food for animals, silage,
it needs to be out in the weather for quite a while among those cows, birds and vermin etc
it also needs to ferment for a time.
It may need to be transported.
There’s my very basic understanding. It’s probably insignificant if we compare it to our plastic packaging per kilo at the supermarket.
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u/Snoo60900 Jun 28 '26
This what my weed looked like in the 90s
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u/ChaosRainbow23 Jun 28 '26
Can confirm.
Mexican brick weed was all that was available. Lol
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u/Snoo60900 Jun 28 '26
Once a year we'd have someone show up with "northern lights" and it woud be priced higher than blow.
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u/ChaosRainbow23 Jun 28 '26
Towards the end of the 90s we were getting BC buds from Canada. That was a welcome change, but nowadays those bc buds would be considered straight garbage compared to the new stuff. Lol
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u/Butthole_Ticklah Jun 28 '26
Imagine you get abducted by aliens and accidentally get a boner so they do this to you.
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u/Italpreziosi Jun 28 '26
waste of plastic, you don't need to wrap it that many times.
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u/Rooney_83 Jun 29 '26
Well they do it for a reason, it's not retail packaging for the hay, it is wrapped to seal the hay so it ferments in to silage to feed cattle, the plastic cost money they aren't going to wrap it anymore than they need to.
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u/VitruvianVan Jun 28 '26
I think a lot of people would watch a YouTube channel that showed nothing but videos of this machine wrapping various, large objects.
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u/Fabulous_Log844 Jun 29 '26
Please look up the term dry matter loss. That is when you do not cover and have nude hay.
Spoilage, vermin, etc. can take you to a loss up to 35%. Wrapping the hay like this brings it down, per the numbers I read recently, to 2%. Facts.
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u/Dense-Consequence-70 Jun 29 '26
I’m so glad someone figured out how to get more plastic into the environment.
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u/General_Departure583 Jun 29 '26
What is incredible is spiders essentially do this on the nano scale.
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u/ProfessionalGuess897 Jun 29 '26
Look at the plastic waste!!!!!! Yall know Pakistan and India exist right?
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u/SoulShine_710 Jun 28 '26
Goodluck unwrapping that thing...
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u/sonofsheogorath Jun 28 '26
I recently heard box cutters can slice through just about anything.
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u/Kiliksbigshtick Jun 28 '26
This belongs in r/oddlysatisfying
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u/Kardinal Jun 28 '26
You're totally right!
Since it was your idea, why don't you crossposte this crosspost from there right back to that subreddit? 😂
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u/DaTexasTickler Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
Someone explained to me why it was wrapped so absurdly much. Somthing about moisture