Hay Grinder?

Hay Grinder?
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho.

Yup this is indeed a hay grinder (I have another picture of one that is a bit more colorful that I might post later if I find it) meant for, grinding up hay! It took me awhile to figure out what these things were for, I initially thought that maybe it was an old* corn chopper for making silage (they do have a lot of livestock here so it would kinda make sense) but now, most Afghans aren’t that far along enough yet (livestock nutrition is almost an afterthought at the moment). After seeing one of these things in action and then asking a few questions I found out that it is for grinding up hay (that is stalks from wheat, rye, and other grains). I had to ask, “What do you use gorund up hay for?” and apparently it is used in the mud stucco and mud bricks that you see everywhere here (some close up pictures of a wall made of their stucco later).

*I say “old” because most setups in the US now are a two in one deal where the corn is sucked up and ground up at the same time then spit out into a trailer of sorts but one of the farms I used to work on had some pretty antiquated machinery and one of them was a “chopper” (or so the boss called it) that we fed corn and corn stalks into and it chopped everything up and spit it out as unfermented silage.