10 Seemingly Harmless Things You Didn't Realise Killed People

7. Hay

You might imagine that hay is an unlikely source of dreaded nasties. Only if it falls on you as a dirty great big soggy lump, perhaps in the form of an overly large bale, you ask? Nope, I am afraid it's not as straightforward as that. Hay and other vegetable matter have a nasty habit of attracting any number of harmful bacteria to them. In 2011, in a Colorado high school some high-spirited pupils spread bales of hay around the building. Leaving it to fester for the next day they gleefully departed the scene of the crime only to find the school shut when they returned and it dumped with a $100,000 clean-up bill! Ever wondered why a Dutch barn has no sides? I used to think it was to save the farmer on building costs, but the real reason is that hay kept in a confined space allows it to build up highly toxic moulds. So toxic in fact that it can make breathing severely difficult and cause asthma sufferers especially to choke. It's worse than that, too. Toxins may be introduced through weed contamination and insect infestation. It's a veritable riot of harmfulness in there. If you keep hay for a long time, in certain carefully controlled conditions you get silage from it. You know silage, it's that pungent whiff in the countryside air that either revolts or delights depending on your attitude to it. The hay undergoes a process of fermentation as it passes into silage, but if its pH rises above 5.0 then a potential problem arises. Improper fermentation can produce silage that causes botulism or listerosis. Who'd have thought that such a bucolic scene of bovine quadrupeds munching their way through gob-fulls of hay in the restful great outdoors might harbour such terrible harm?