At least your bales are straw-y. Round here, south Hants, they wrap them up in miles of black plastic. Though I did see some once wrapped in a rather fetching shade of pale lavender, but still plastic.

Bring back proper bales, tied with organic baler twine!

'K, now Someone Who Knows tell me the plastic-wrapped bales are silage.

The plastic on the silage or haylage bales annoys me too Sharon. But, I'm not sure there is another way to do it for today's ways of storage and then moving feed around to where it is needed in the winter. The plastic enables bales to be stored without needing huge barns.

There is a peripatetic company round here who does the 'wrapping' - it needs specialist machinery - and, to overcome people's resistance to the plastic decided to use different colours to represent different charities, and £1 for each wrapped bale goes to the charity.

People seem to have been taken in by this, and there are many different colours around - yellow, purple, lilac, light green, light blue, pink, orange, white - all of which are very visually intrusive in the landscape (whereas black or dark green are almost invisible).

But, because it's for charity, apparently it's OK... what people using the service seem to fail to realise is that the £1 is coming from their pocket (it's already built into the prce), rather than the supplier's.

There are services that collect used plastic feed bags from farms, and I imagine used bale wrappings are also part of this service.

It's hard to imagine how they could ever not use the plastic, now this system has been widely adopted. Old fashioned silage clamps are largely obsolete - not least because of the pollution risk, and the huge up-front cost to build them. And it's very difficult to move silage from a clamp to distant fields in the depths of winter, whereas plastic bales can be stored in piles near to where they will be fed, as they are made.