Organic riches in a house of straw
Story and images by Meg Knowles
Dave Lanfear and workers on Buffalo’s west side.

If the wolf is at your door, should your house be made of straw? In The Three Little Pigs, the wolf huffs and puffs and blows the pig’s straw house down, but Hamburg resident Dave Lanfear would definitely call that a fairy tale. He would tell you that straw-bale construction offers great protection from wind, heat, and cold, and is, in fact, as effective as fiberglass when it comes to insulation. Lanfear, owner of Bale on Bale Construction, is a local expert in straw-bale building, and has worked on more than a dozen straw-bale building projects in the last five years. The latest is the straw-bale greenhouse raised last spring and summer on the West Side of Buffalo by the Massachusetts Avenue Project.

“Straw is a great insulator. It’s a natural material, it’s a nontoxic material, and it’s produced locally. It’s really effective for houses,” Lanfear says from the building site at 387 Massachusetts Avenue, adjacent to MAP’s urban farm, which lies on a patchwork of vacant and abandoned lots.

MAP will use the greenhouse as part of its urban agriculture training program Growing Green, which employs city youth each summer to plant crops, develop food products, and learn about the importance of their own food, nutrition, sustainability, and food systems issues. With mud streaked across her face, and up to her elbows in a straw and clay concoction used to pack the bales together, Growing Green program director Diane Picard explains the significance of the greenhouse. “We employ a lot of low-income kids in this neighborhood who don’t have a lot of opportunities. So the greenhouse will help extend our season. We want to grow cash crops like fresh basil and mint all year round and sell that to restaurants.” The money from such crops can be used to employ more kids and keep Growing Green in business twelve months a year, despite Buffalo’s short growing season.

Why did Growing Green choose straw-bale construction? When MAP first dreamed up the greenhouse project, Picard contacted architect and engineer Kevin Connors at the University at Buffalo’s School of Architecture and Planning, who teaches a natural building systems seminar. Connors recommended the straw-bale construction method and with his students, designed the greenhouse for MAP. Lanfear came on board as the construction specialist, and under the leadership of the two men and Picard, an old-fashioned community “barn raising” was planned.

And so, on a chilly but blindingly sunny day last April, close to a hundred people converged on the garden lots on Massachusetts Avenue. Architecture students, community activists, and neighbors trickled into the lot to collaborate on this grass-roots urban renewal project. Sleeves were rolled up and excitement was in the air. “This project is unique, because it’s the first one. It’s the first straw-bale building in Buffalo,” Lanfear proclaims. Children played on a huge mound of sand, and adults worked at “trimming” the bales so they would fit together more easily. The bales would be laid on a concrete foundation. Plaster was mixed in a cement mixer out of mud, sand, straw, and water. This was packed together in a rubber kiddie pool by a group of graduate students using their bare feet, in a scene reminiscent of Lucille Ball stomping grapes. “It’s easy to get a group of fairly inexperienced people together and build a straw-bale wall,” Lanfear explains. Ultimately, plastering was completed later in the summer by Growing Green youth workers. The greenhouse is now covered with plastic tarps, awaiting the installation of the polycarbonate roof and front wall. This clear plastic sheath will allow solar energy to heat the greenhouse.


While only a handful of straw-bale buildings have been constructed in New York State, the straw-bale process has seen a resurgence in the Southwest in the last fifteen years and proliferates there. Straw-bale construction features a passive solar design. As the sun shines through the roof of the greenhouse onto the straw wall, which is coated with two to three inches of earthen plaster, heat is absorbed and then let off slowly after the sun has gone. The wall remains warm, heating the building, which requires no additional heat source.

This passive solar design will take advantage of the winter sun in Buffalo, according to Lanfear. The straw bales are highly insulating and bring a rating of R50, which, “if you know anything about insulation, is off the charts.”

Not only is MAP’s new greenhouse sustainable and biodegradable in case of natural disaster, the straw is long-lasting and an extremely inexpensive building material. The 130 bales used on the project were acquired for $4 per bale from a Hamburg farmer, according to a story in the Buffalo News. The entire project cost under $10,000, and is a fine example of the interest in renewable materials. For Picard, it has been an “amazing process.”

Independent filmmaker Meg Knowles is a professor in the Buffalo State College Communications Department and recently completed a documentary on the Growing Green project.


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