ਤੂੜੀ

Tudi (ਤੂੜੀ), also written toori, is the Punjabi word for chopped wheat straw, the dry fodder stored after the wheat harvest and fed to cattle and buffaloes through the year. Once the grain is threshed out, the golden straw that remains is not waste. Chopped fine, it becomes tudi.

What does tudi mean in Punjabi?

The word names the finished fodder, not the standing crop. Wheat straw left after the harvest is gathered and chopped into short pieces, traditionally by hand and now usually by machine, and that chopped straw is tudi. It is the dry half of the village ration: where pathhe are the fresh greens cut every morning, tudi is the stored dry feed that waits in the shed in every season, ready whenever the animals are fed.

How is tudi made and fed?

After the wheat is harvested and threshed, the straw is run through a chaff cutter or a straw machine and stored under cover, in a shed or a covered stack, safe from rain. At feeding time it is mixed with green pathhe and sometimes with oil cake, because chopped straw is bulky dry roughage and animals digest it better in a mixed ration, as Punjab's farm experts point out. Tudi is also a second income from the same field: one Bathinda grower quoted in a 2025 report put his yield at about twenty quintals of toori from a single acre of wheat, sold on to dairy owners and traders.

Why does the price of tudi swing so much?

Tudi prices swing sharply, and both directions hurt someone. In 2025 Punjab's wheat growers watched toori rates fall to between 130 and 180 rupees a quintal, against 500 rupees the year before, as dairies shifted to silage and paddy straw and stocks lay unsold; PAU's wheat experts warned that unsold tudi could push farmers back towards burning field residue. In another season, cow shelters have protested in the opposite direction, saying mills, cardboard factories and brick kilns bought up so much straw that gaushalas could not get tudi for their cattle at any fair price.