Why Chop the Straw Before Feeding It? The Animal Wastes Less

A horse or a cow fed long hay or straw pulls out the parts it prefers and treads the rest into the bedding, which wastes a substantial share of expensive fodder. Chopping the material into short lengths removes the ability to sort, so the animal eats what it is given. Short material also mixes evenly with grain, roots and supplements, so a balanced ration can be prepared and fed rather than separate items offered. It is easier to chew, which matters for old animals and for those working hard, and it takes less space in a manger and in store.

The mechanism is simple and was made in enormous numbers:

• •A trough carries material towards a cutting point
• •Toothed rollers grip it and feed it forward at a set rate
• •A flywheel carries one or more curved blades across the mouth
• •Gearing links the rollers to the flywheel so the length is fixed
• •Changing that gearing changes the cut length
• •Power came from a handle, a horse gin, a belt or later a motor

Machines of this kind produced a recognisable and appalling pattern of injury that appears throughout nineteenth and twentieth century medical and agricultural records. The feed rollers grip whatever enters them, including a hand pushing material in, and they cannot be stopped or reversed quickly on the older designs, so the hand is drawn towards blades driven by a heavy flywheel that carries enough stored energy to continue through an arm. Children were frequently set to operate them. Guarding was minimal and was routinely removed as an obstruction. Agricultural machinery legislation from the mid twentieth century onwards targeted exactly these mechanisms, and older machines still in use remain a recognised hazard.

The same workshop produced a family of similar machines for preparing feed, and they appear together in farm inventories. Root cutters sliced turnips and mangolds into fingers or pulped them, since a whole root is difficult for an animal to eat and wasteful. Cake breakers crushed the compressed blocks of oilseed residue that were bought in as a protein supplement. Oat crushers and bruisers flattened grain so that it could be digested rather than passing through whole. Mills ground it finer. All of them share the same arrangement of a hopper, a feed mechanism and a heavy flywheel, and all of them carry the same hazard.

The machine is a useful illustration of how mechanisation actually proceeded, which was not as a single revolution. It spread widely from the late eighteenth century, decades before threshing machines and long before tractors, precisely because it was cheap, small, useful on any farm with a horse and operable by one person with a handle. Adoption of farm machinery generally followed that pattern, with small stationary devices doing repetitive indoor jobs arriving first and field machinery much later, because the small machines required no change to fields, fences, teams or working practice and paid for themselves immediately in fodder saved.

Chopping straw and hay stops an animal sorting out the parts it likes and treading the rest into the bedding, and it lets a mixed ration be prepared. Toothed rollers feed material to blades on a heavy flywheel, and the gearing between them sets the length. Those rollers grip a hand as readily as straw, and the flywheel carries enough energy to continue through an arm.