Straw is an excellent building material: It is inexpensive, readily available, and easy to work with.

If you could stack blocks and smear mud when you were a kid, you can build a straw house!

Straw is a RENEWABLE RESOURCE: It takes one season to grow, versus many years for a tree.

It is considered a waste product in the grain industry: Burning off fields is a major source of air pollution,

so building with straw helps the planet in more ways than one.

Building with straw bales became popular in the midwest with the advent of the mechanical baler

in the late 19th century, and some of those houses are still standing.

There are two types of bale houses; post-and-beam with straw infill, and loadbearing, where the straw walls

alone support the roof. The house featured here, built by Karl Larson in Silver City, Nevada is the latter.

Any well-built bale house is wolf-proof, but Karl further cheated him by putting a rock and brick veneer

over the bales...it doesn't even look like it's built of straw.

The house uses both active and passive solar heat, solar hot water, and a graywater system. Power is provided by

 PV panels and a windmill. It is quiet, inexpensive to heat and cool, and a very pleasant living space..