[Degradation of cereal straw with lye]

Straw is a plentiful agricultural waste product. It cannot be used as the sole feed for ruminants and it cannot even serve to satisfy maintenance requirements. The rumen microbes are not capable of breaking down the cell walls in cereal straw rapidly enough or to a sufficient extent. To improve the utilization of straw, efforts were made to treat this material by physical, chemical and biological methods. Some of these procedures will only improve the intake of straw by the animal, whereas the primary object continues to be the improvement of digestibility. Alkali treatment of straw is the most suitable method for this purpose. The mode of action of alkali on the cell walls of straw is described in the present paper.