Strawbale Homes
California Straw Building Assn
We're a non-profit organization whose members are architects, engineers, builders, and people interested in straw building. Our mission is to further the practice of straw building by exchanging current information and practical experience, promoting and conducting research and testing, and making that body of knowledge available to working professionals and the public at large
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Lighthook's Strawbale House Page
"This straw appears small and light,and most people do not know how really weighty it is. If people knew the true value of this straw, a human revolution could occur, which would become powerful enough
to move the country and the world."
Masanobu Fukuoka, in The One Straw Revolution
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Strawbale Construction
Straw bale construction uses baled straw from wheat, oats, barley, rye, rice and others in walls covered by stucco. Straw bale are traditionally a waste product which farmers do not till under the soil, but do sell as animal bedding or landscape supply due to their durable nature. In many areas of the country, it is also burned, causing severe air quality problems. It is important to recognize that straw is the dry plant material or stalk left in the field after a plant has matured, been harvested for seed, and is no longer alive. Hay bales are made from short species of livestock feed grass that is green/alive and are not suitable for this application. Hay is also typically twice the price of straw.
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Strawjet Technology
The concept behind the StrawJet technology is very simple. Straw and many other field crops have a hollow stem or one filled with soft pith. They all can support considerable loads parallel to the axis of the straw but are quite weak when stressed in any other direction, (try this with your drinking straw). David Ward and his team have developed a way to utilize this inherent strength of hollow straw.
The StrawJet harvests straw in the field before it has been crushed or damaged, orients the stems so they are all parallel, adds a clay based binding material, compresses the bundle and binds it into a continuous length of 2 inch cable using a polyester yarn. Once the clay has dried, the cable becomes a rigid cylinder.
StrawCore members can be combined into panels or used individually. Using this technology, buildings can be constructed rapidly with only hand labor and without requiring large capacity trucks to move the material from the field to the building site.
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Surfin Strawbale
The complete, unexpurgated, alphabetical, annotated compendium on strawbale construction is presented here for your pleasure in its entirety on one gargantuan page
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The IronStraw Group
The IronStraw Group became active as a nonprofit in 1999 after five years of building strawbale homes in the private market. IronStraw relocated to "Straw Country" in central Washington State and partnered with the Washington Association of Wheat Growers and 85 other organizations and businesses in IronStraw's Partnership Program. Our goal is to make "Stronger Communities through Strawbale Building."
Awarded the prestigious Founders of a New Northwest award by Sustainable Northwest, the IronStraw Group is a compact, dynamic, and effective organization promoting sustainable building.
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