“It'll be burned at night on a farmer's fire”: Gippsland's hay bale dilemma

Every year dairy farmers are faced with the question of what to do with the build up of plastic wrapping - or silage wrap - that encases the hay bales used to feed their cows.

Peter Neavan owns and operates a 330-acre dairy farm in Newry, central Gippsland and says that the silage wrap is “not recycled around here, so it just goes to the landfill”.

“There's nothing you can do,” he told the Gippsland Monitor. “You can either chuck it in the landfill or burn it. Burning it is illegal, but quite a few people do that because it's expensive to take it to the landfill.”

Neavan estimates his farm goes through 400 bales of silage a year, the equivalent of five or six bags of plastic waste. It costs him about $60 to dispose of each bag.

That’s an extra bill of around $300 a year. 

Heyfield farmer Fiona Sundermann points to the labour intensive task of wrapping and transporting the wrap.

Packaging the plastic for landfill

Sundermann and her husband own a 500-acre dairy farm at Heyfield and another property at Stratford. Both use silage wrap regularly.

They no longer operate the farms but lease them out to other farmers.

“If I dumped tonnes of rubbish on your front lawn, that would not be socially acceptable,” Sundermann told the Gippsland Monitor, “But somehow on a farm people think that it's okay to dump mountains of plastic.”

In 2019, Wellington Shire gave residents the one off opportunity to take their silage waste to the tip for free.

The wrap also had to be clean in order for the tip to accept it.

“You couldn’t have cow poo or mud on it. It had to be folded up and put in these bulker bags or fertiliser bags,” Sundermann said. 

After the plastic had been washed and cleaned Fiona, her husband, workers, and friends who volunteered to help, cut the heavy plastic with knives before climbing up a ladder and packing the silage strips into bulkier bags.

“It was a massive job,” she said. “It took us weeks. We paid people to help and we had some very good friends come and help. It was a horrible job, it's a very labour intensive business.”

No current solution

South Gippsland Shire Mayor, John Schelling, told the Gippsland Monitor that “the major issue is when you do take it [to the tip], it's got to be washed and totally clean, which is almost an impossibility in some respects”.

“No one seems to be able to make a dollar out of it - to clean it and prepare it and then break it down so it becomes a plastic product. This has made it a major issue for our landfills.”

Schelling agreed it was an impost on farmers, but was unsure on a permanent solution. One idea was to have farmers move away from single silage rolls to stacks. Stacks are larger bunches of hay bales that require less plastic enclosing.

Neavan has moved to wrapping his bales in these “sausage” forms. “We went to that last year to try and reduce the amount of silage wrap we were generating.”

There is no such thing as a free lunch, however, and the larger rolls present their own challenges, including transportation.

Even if farmers were to use larger stacks to reduce waste, Schelling acknowledged that it doesn’t get to the heart of the issue, saying “a lot of farms are going back towards silage stacks. But even then, you've still got [plastic] covers”.

Schelling said if a better solution wasn’t found, “unfortunately, what will invariably happen is it'll be burned at night on a farmer’s fire”.

Image credit: Fiona Sundermann.