I have considered "shocking" my cornstalks and bringing the shock to the barn and running the stalks through an electric wood chipper and blowing it right into the feed bunks. Plan on shocking my corn near the end of Sept (when everyone is cutting silage) and leaving the ear on the stalk and chopping all together. More protein in the stalks as they are cut green like hay and allowed to dry. I just hate the thought of all of the mice in the shocks as I handle them! As well as bringing hundreds of mice into the barn.
We made lots of bag silage. I used a smaller chipper shredder at first but it spit the stuff out pretty close to the ground and it was a pain to chip some then scoop it up then chip some more and not have a bagful...
I bought a used chopper body for 300 bucks to continue the process.
I hand cut a few rows of corn and stack them on a flat rack. Bring them up to the chopper and have at it.
I screwed a cardboard barrel onto the end of the spout to help direct the silage down into a foldable plastic pallet.
I run enough through to fill the pallet then start filling old feed bags. I pound push step on and in general treat the stuff with utter disrespect to get the bags as full as I can.
Then I place the full feed bag inside a plastic trash bag and use an old vacuum cleaner to suck the air out. It usually goes down pretty small. Then I twist and tape the end of the bag and on to the next one.
It's a long process but makes pretty decent feed.
We lost a lot to the critters one year when I just stacked the bags on pallets beside the shed.
I have put some up on a flat rack and it fared better.
We put up a bunch of lawn grass silage in 5 gallon buckets one year and it made OK feed. I mowed one day and packed 5 gallon buckets lined with kitchen size trash bags and with lids the next. I didn't allow for the fact that lawn grass will dry faster than the stuff out in the field. If I did it again I would mow in the morning and bag by the afternoon at the latest. We used a lot of buckets. I think I had 40 or so that I got from work. I'd rather just fill big bags and with grass I would skip the feedbag step I used in the corn silage.
I considered barrels but figured it would be almost impossible to dig the stuff out in the winter after it had frozen in. I have pick axed a lot of silage off the sides of silos in the winter up here.
I also thought about a pit but same thing, in the winter you aren't going to be able to just fork it out especially if you have a small pit and sizing the pit to the amount of animals you have can be tricky. Spoilage is an issue if you can't keep ahead of it.
CP of corn stalks usually runs to maybe 8% at the max and the norm is 5%, drought stressed stalks will trend higher. Corn is the last place I ever look at to gain on CP. Corn is about energy. Silage is much more palatable than dry stalks.
We made silage out of our end of season sweet corn this past summer.
Let me just stop right here and say that it is used for our milk cows. GOATS AND SILAGE ARE A DEADLY COMBINATION. Not just susceptable to listeria but also enterotoxemia (even if they are vaccinated) and they just do not do well at all. Sheep seem to do just fine. I have vast experience helping my neighbor on his sheep and goat dairy. Sheep milked wonderfully and goats dropped like flies.
We enjoy fresh sweet corn but I have found that if I freeze it, we just don't cook it and it stays right there in the freezer. So this year, we ate what we wanted and then started chopping the stalks for silage. There were many ears of various stages since I staggered the plantings.
I bought a small chipper/shredder at a yard sale. Discovered that it was too wimpy to really chop up small limbs so we took the metal "screen" off of the bottom that the material is pounded thru. I have a slab of concrete that apparently used to be the floor of a small building long ago. I set up on it and the boys fed the stalks thru the shredded. It really only pulverized it and did not make very tiny pieces with out the screen. That worked out just fine because with the screen, I spend more time unplugging and cleaning than chopping.
I got a bunch of metal 55 gallon barrels with their lids and rings free from a business in town. They were clean but I pressure washed them out to make sure. I did not line them with anything. I cut a round wood disc from plywood to use to pack it in the barrell. The boys took turns stomping on the disc in the barrel as we went along.
We sealed them up when full. I was afraid of it turning into a bomb in our barn so I put a PVC stem in the bung on the lid and attached tubing to that. I stuck the end of the tubing in a milk jug full of water to make an air lock.
My Jersey girls just love it!
I did the same with the huge amount of grass from our yard after mowing. I added diluted molasses to it to sweeten it up. Bermuda grass haylage is not as palatable to the milkers as the corn silage but if I mix it with a bit of feed, our calves eat it with gusto.
This was an experiment for us after watching the BBC series " War Time Farm" (thank you Elk Hound!!) as part of our homeschool curriculum. We will definitely do it again next summer and I am thinking about a bigger pit style system. There are two huge silage pits on this farm from many years ago but that is too large scale for me and the boys. Plus they are just too far away fromthe barn-- especially since I am using a bucket or a wheel barrow. Something between the barrels and that...... I do like having the barrels handy in the barn, tho....
in ww2 in u.k. they cut everything for silage....even stinging nettles.
Elk, nettles are nitrogen 'hot'.
If you are careful about gathering nettles, people can eat them too.
__________________
Roger
Quote:
Originally Posted by Thomas Gallowglass
Amoung the things I've learned in life are these two tidbits...
1) don't put trust into how politicians explain things
2) you are likely to bleed if you base your actions upon 'hope'...
__________________
i went to the woods because i wished to live deliberately to front only the essential facts of life,.......,and not,when i came to die,discover that i had not lived...Henry David Thoreau
__________________
i went to the woods because i wished to live deliberately to front only the essential facts of life,.......,and not,when i came to die,discover that i had not lived...Henry David Thoreau
I drink a tea with stinging nettles. It's very good for ladies. Lots of iron. When I hemorrhaged with the loss of my baby in the second trimester in 2012. I started at 13.8 iron level. I was able to get it back to a 13 in 8 weeks. No iron pills. My dr likes me eating weeds. She eats weeds now. Lol
Thanks for all the info everybody. This gives me a lot to think about.
I am surprised and disappointing about the goat issue. I was hoping to feed it to my goats as a supplement to increase milk. We did buy a load of ewes one time off of a commercial farm. The truck arrived with 149 live ewes and one dead one. Turns out he was feeding silage and the ewe had listeria. So I am already leery of feeding to sheep. I may feed it to some calves instead. My issue really is I a was trying to find a good energy supplement for the ewes, besides grain. I usually feed all my grain to pigs.
With all the cautions here I don't know if I should be feeding silage at all.
Elkhound- I read through the pdf link. It looks interesting, but it does not mention the major disadvantage of killing stock. Although I think the article is about feeding cattle only.
I know what you mean... I was planning on feeding my dairy goats as well when I started on this venture. I already had it "cooking" when I began helping out on the dairy. In all honesty, it was not well run and my friend was in over his head. I thought that since I had been milking goats for more than 20 years, I could do a better job of managing it while feeding my own...... I was wrong. I did not kill any of my milkers but I dang sure made some of them sick enough to get a good look at death's door. That was last year.
This year, I decided silage was strickly for the cattle. Even so, I had one ornery old doe escape and sneak silage while I was feeding the milk cow. Just a few bites..... I found her dead a day later. She was very old and it was bitterly cold and I am not positive that the silage did her in but.....
Any way you could get it round baled and wrapped, those make nice silage bags if anyone in the neighborhood has a good round baler?
Just hard for me to see 5 gallon buckets lasting very long, cattle eat a lot of silage, even 55 gallon barrels of it seems like it would go really fast. Getting it packed tight enough so no air in it is the hard part, too.
Alternatively, can you chop the stalks and get them to dry, bale it as dry hay? Loses some of the feed value perhaps.
There was an article a couple years back in The Country Today about a guy that milked 750 goats and all he fed was silage he bought from another family member. Worked so well he was looking at doubling his herd size.
__________________
Deja Moo; The feeling I've heard this bull before.
The most important issue in making silage whether it is n a 100' x 300' bunker or a 5 gallon bucket is this: OXYGEN EXCLUSION. To preserve the plant material and allow for anaerobic fermentation to occur you have to get rid of the oxygen. That requires a tight pack and a good seal.
I recently saw somewhere, somebody had built a square silo out of pallets. 2 to a side for one tier. Take plastic trash bags, and tack/staple them to the inside, 1/2 lap them to seal out any air and fill. Dome it when finished and put a tarp over the top. To feed, have one pallet that you designate as a door and have it fixed to where you can open it. Use T posts at every juncture of the pallets. Wire pallets to each other where they join together and with the T posts. IF you need more highth, set pallets on top the ones below and wire them together leaving No space for a door.
Well it looks like I might be changing my plans. What if I let the corn stocks dry down and just chop them u for feed for the goats and sheep? Do you think they would dry down enough to store?
I would just graze the corn, but we grow a large market garden and the corn is in the mix. I can't get the livestock in, without risking the rest of the garden.
Yes that can be done, BUT it works better with OP Corn as it has more protein in the stalks, and animals eating it like it better than H corn. ALSO, Its much easier to make a silo for this type of fodder. A screen either put into a hoop and covered when filled, OR the above mentioned pallet made silo with screen wire instead of plastic lining.
I intend to do this myself, shuck out the ears and chop up the stalks.
My goats love corn stalks. They eat them like its candy. In the summer when we eat corn on the cob. I shuck them and feed to the goats. They love to eat the left over cobs too when were done eating. At this moment they are eating a corn stalk bale over their hay. My goats are weird! I love them!
17Likes
