
Build our house out of straw?
This article appeared in The Baley Pulpit,TLS#7/Summer 1994.
“May we look upon our Treasures, and the furniture of our Houses, and the Garments in which we array ourselves, and try whether the seeds of war have any nourishment in these possessions, or not.”
– from the Journal of John Woolman an 18th Century Quaker
“Build our house out of straw?” When our neighbor suggested the idea as a solution to our housing problem, both my wife, Nena, and I reacted similarly. “You must be kidding!” Even when he showed us a copy of Fine Homebuilding with an article in it by Gary Strang (1985) on a studio built out of straw bales, we were dubious. It was just too weird (images of rotting hay, mouse hotels, and pig stories readily came to mind). The idea was too simple and straightforward to be believed.
Try as we might, however, we kept returning to the idea of it. It did seem to fit our condition: Using straw bales was 1) low cost…we were near broke, having used the last of our meager savings to buy a small piece of land; 2) a way to stay cool (and warm)…having just moved to southwest New Mexico from Alaska, I was scared to death of the heat; 3) fast and physically easy to build…I just couldn’t face the slow, heavy work of adobe; and 4) ecologically sound…besides being energy efficient, a straw-bale building uses a renewable resource (often viewed as a waste product) that was locally available. Done right, building with straw uses very few trees.
In the end, we decided to go for it. Seven years later, we have no regrets. Just the opposite. We didn’t know it at the time, we were not the only ones interested. Through Strang’s article and newly formed friendships with Susan Mullen, a permaculturist and close neighbor, and an enthusiastic Matts Myhrman in Arizona, we learned of a small but dedicated network of straw-bale aficionados. Nor were any of us particularly innovative. The true trailblazers of straw were the folks from the Sandhills of Nebraska who, out of necessity, started a tradition of building their homes out of native hay and straw beginning back in the late 1800s and continuing up through the early 1940s.
The work of the Nebraska homesteaders remains the key. It took a fact-finding journey to Nebraska in 1989 by Matts and Judy Knox, his wife, to finally convince us that we, like most of those early Nebraskan straw-bale builders, could further simplify our technologies by using straw bales as load-bearing walls without the time and expense of poles or posts. We modern practitioners of straw have come to call it building “Nebraska style.”
It is this style of building that has captivated my imagination and been the thrust of our most recent building endeavors. Much good work needs to be done to revitalize the straw-bale building tradition and get it accepted into common practice. Tackling the building codes is part of that work along with trying (and sharing through The Last Straw) new and innovative techniques. I have no doubt in my mind that sooner, rather than later, this Earth will demand it of us.
