Silage

So this is a new one for me…

I was informed by the farmer the other day that they are going to start cutting the corn. All the corn in my area is used for silage and its time for it to go. This is great news for us obviously but I never knew they would plant so much just for silage. Is there a cost benefit to this??

Must need feed! There are a number of reasons why farmers choose corn for silage. It’s a very palatable forage and it’s attractive to farmers because of the consistent quality, higher yields and higher energy content compared to many other forages.

Production takes a lot less labor and equipment time than other forages because it takes only a single harvest rather than hay which can require multiple harvests. The cost per ton of dried product is much lower for corn silage than for other crops which are harvested for forage.

Yep, what Ben said. The semi loads are heading out of the fields by me. Down fall is much less forage base corn on the ground after harvest

Which means the food plots this year will get that much more attention! I hope.

I would also venture a guess that they were hedging their bets… If the price of corn is high let it fully mature and harvest as feed corn, but prices are down (supply is high) so they’ll come out ahead by turning it into silage.

What Will said ^^^^^^^^^

My family knows about how much they need annually based on the number of cattle they feed. On years like this, with prices down, it’s easy to put a little extra in the pits.

There are large commercial dairies in South Dakota that chop thousands upon thousands of acres of silage every year. You can see the piles from miles away.

Agree with Ben and Will on both items. I notice the neighbor leaves a lot more out to pick on years the price is up. I’m hoping his goes down soon, his fields border our woods and once its down activity in the woods always goes up ten-fold. I swear the deer will live in those corn fields in early fall.

If the wind blows like predicted in SD this weekend, I’m probably going to be doing a spot and stalk hunt in the corn. My buddy’s place has over 320 acres in corn this year. It’s fun sitting on the edge of the corn at night watching the deer filter out at dark. Darn it, I keep getting myself more worked up about this weekend….

Beef prices are very high right now and silage is excellent feed given the cost per ton. If you’ve got the cattle or the demand from local ranchers for the feed, turning corn to silage is way more profitable than waiting to harvest corn and selling at <$3.50 a BU. Corn prices are just a mess right now, the buy price at some rural MN elevators must be around $3.00 a BU. CBT had corn hit $3.20 yesterday before it rebounded slightly.

Funny story, I want to high school with the guy that now runs the ranch next to my hunting property. He’s a lot more aggressive of an operator than his father was and he’s much more in tune with the fact that sometimes you have to spend money to make money. 3 years ago he tells the old man no way are wasting time cutting silage anymore. I’m bring in the contract cutter. The old man is as cheap as the day is long and almost had a stroke at the idea of paying somebody to do something that used to be “free”.

Just watching that contract outfit cut the contract forage cutting outfit get loose on their 400 acres was a site. Watching these guys go at it with the forage cutters is just great entertainment. That cutter is going faster than you can run and blowing out a fire hose stream of silage into a semi that’s following the cutter and they go around corners and turn 180 degrees and they don’t spill a pound of silage on most fields.

The contract outfit did in 8 hours what used to take these ranchers two weeks to do. It isn’t like grandpa did it with the wagon and the 2-row behind the John Deer.

Grouse

I wish i was on the farm cutting silage right now. A job I always found fun growing up. It’s feed for our cattle year round.

Silage was always my favorite crop growing up on the farm as a kid.
Smelled the best and easiest to do labor wise.

FishBlood&RiverMud wrote:

I wish i was on the farm cutting silage right now. A job I always found fun growing up. It’s feed for our cattle year round.

Me too! The two things that I hated growing up but LOVE now are cutting wood and cutting hay… It’s funny how much I enjoy getting on a tractor and mowing hay when I get a chance now.

I’ve always been a fan of all day hay bail’n!!

Once a farm boy, always a farm boy.

Stacking square bales is my least favorite past time.

kooty wrote:

Stacking square bales is my least favorite past time.

Yeah, but even that was better than picking rock. I haven’t seen anybody using a square bailer in several years and good riddance I say.

On the other end of the scale, I rode a couple of rounds with my uncle when he was planting corn 2 years ago. Wow was that an eye-opener.

Here’s how it works now. He hits the “go” button and takes his hands off the wheel. The tractor drives itself. The planter controls itself, to the point where it even regulates each individual row and will cut off row by row if a field needs to taper rows together.

There are absolutely no visible variations in row spacing between passes or in straightness of the rows. If you measure the outside row from one pass to the next, it will not vary by more than a few inches, if at all. When the planter is out of seed, the whole operation stops by itself. The planter tells you to the individual seed how many seeds were planted in that field. The speed and the precision was absolutely astonishing.

Total automation and self-driving “drone tractors” are probably 5 years away. They’ll just call you when they need you, but otherwise they prefer to work alone.

Grouse

Yeah about 4 years ago i was running the ripper in the fall. Dad had installed GPS, but had no idea how to run it…So i started pushing buttons while in the field, ended up figuring it out and was hands off the wheels except for corners. Awesome!!

I certainly can’t drive straight…So this was helpful Lol.

kooty wrote:

Stacking square bales is my least favorite past time.

Thanks for jinxing me Kooty. I finally made it up to the farm to get out hunting over the weekend and wouldn’t ya know it my dad was in the middle of putting up square bails… I ended up unloading about 1000 bails.

We rarely use them on the farm Grouse but he puts up a few thousand a year to sell to locals who have hobby farms with just a couple animals and aren’t set up with equipment for the larger bails.

How do your forearms look

All scratched up? lol.

I’m not sure if it makes me smart or a wuss, but learned that long sleeves and fencing gloves save me from looking like I spent the weekend wrestling kitty cats.

We all smarten up eventually. I just learned to use my knees more than my forearms when lifting the bale for them 3-7 high stacks. Took a lot of scratched up forearms to figure that one out though.