Silos and Silage

[spencer200]

Well those are just a tad bigger than the ones on our dairy 40'x100' and 30'x100' I would think they would have to have move than two harvesters going to keep that many trucks busy and 4 tractors busy packing.

 

[Bird]

Yeah, Spencer, I'm sure they had more than two harvesters running, and I don't even know how many trucks. They had trucks coming and going from the south and they had them coming and going from the east, so I just followed one of the empty trucks east 5 or 6 miles, saw where he went, and could see two of the harvesters from there. I don't know how far the ones coming from the south were traveling; just know they went a few miles south down the highway, then turned east, but I didn't follow any of them.

I think the thing that fascinated me most was seeing those big articulated tractors up on top of that mound. I knew the silage was packed pretty tight, but for those tractors to not sink in at all . . . and that's a lot of weight.

And big numbers are, in many cases, mind boggling to an old country boy. My Dad's best friend when they were growing up worked nothing but Guernsey dairies all his life (except for a hitch in the SeaBees in WWII), and when I was a kid, I've helped them milk a hundred or so cows (by hand in those days - we only had one and sometimes two milk cows ourselves), but even with the machines they have now . . ., 6,000 cows to milk? One of these days I want to go see that, too.

 

[Bird]

Robert, I'm not sure whether we're talking about the same thing or not; may be. A number of folks in this area use the clear, perforated plastic wrap instead of twine on their hay balers (round bales) and that also leaves the ends open, but the ones I was talking about had the complete bale wrapped in opaque white plastic. What I was told, and believed at the time at least, was that you couldn't do that with hay or the condensation inside that plastic would ruin the hay, but not silage.

 

[Will_C]

Bird,
The neighbors just bought a new JD baler that is a silage special. They bale hay wet, and the plastic keeps it just like a mini silo, I'm told.

 

[njrqs]

That's a hell of a lot of corn there bird.

We have big coal loading facilities like that with dozers running around on the top, but have never seen crops or anything stored outside like that.

Huge !!!!!

 

[Ozarker]

OK, this city boy is going to bite. What the heck is silage.

 

[RobS]

Pretty amazing pictures Bird, thanks for sharing them. My boys (and I) have a couple of farm videos and one shows filling a bunker though not nearly as big. Same process and they run the big tractor over it to pack things down/squeeze out air. In the video the whole thing gets covered in black plastic and old tires to hold it in place /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

 

[Bird]

Ozarker, my old dictionary defines silage as "Fodder converted into succulent food for livestock through processes of anerobic acid fermentation (as in a silo)." It's plant matter with the right amount of moisture, ground up, packed and sealed to ferment. In this particular case, it's nothing but corn; however, other grains or greenery is sometimes also used.

 

[Bird]

<font color=blue>the whole thing gets covered in black plastic and old tires to hold it in place</font color=blue>

Sometimes I've seen black and sometimes white plastic; don't know that it makes any difference. On this particular one they used white last year. And they do have several tires on it, but I noticed last year that, from a distance, it would appear to have lots of tires all over it, but when I got closer, I noticed that the majority of it was not whole tires anyway. It was either some other kind of black rings all held together, or possibly tires split, and each one connected to the 4 on either side of it.

 

[spencer200]

for lack of better word fermented grass or corn that is feed to dairy or beef cattle, it is harvested at a higher moisture so that when it is stored it heats and turns into silage, if properly harvested and stored once heated and cured the product can easily be stored for a couple years.