Blowers (off-topic) silo related

[JeffNY]

Well I realise this is off-topic, but since it is cattle related, why not? We have this old IH blower, (IH56). The thing is a piece of junk, well it works but it has issues. Either way, I am curious to those who still use a silo, or know of someone. What is the best brand as far as the blowers go? Gehl makes one heck of a forage wagon, the darn things are fast. How are their blowers? How about Victor? or any other blower.. More or less need a good named blower, that works well. We can't feed ours as heavy as you are supposed to, the thing does push air. But I do beleive it is hindered, the band itself is ok, but it's old.


Thanks



Jeff

[evermoor]

Patz makes a real good one. Anything made by them is extremely heavy duty. Not that we own one my silo has been empty for years.

[DaleK]

Dion makes great blowers if you have a dealer, other than that they're pretty much a toss up. We only use ours for rolled high moisture corn now, we use my uncles DeMuth blower but it's only for grain.

[JeffNY]

We have a Dion forage wagon, I love the controls on it. You can stop and start the auger, the Gehl is fast and unloads nicely. But no control for the feed chain. Other than Dion, hear anything about gehl?



Jeff

[cloverfarm]

Gehl blower -- pretty good
Badger unloader -- pretty good
A neighbor chopped and brought their wagons. He had an International chopper.

We had a 60-foot concrete block silo for the milk cows.

I was always glad when chopping silage was done, having three small children (at thtat time) to wrangle. First off, the wagons were pretty scary. And so was our neighbor driving them :yeeha: .(Kind of a lead foot. Another dairy farmer, all of life has to happen between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. to fit it in around chore time!) So was DH going up and down the silo. So was the possiblility of someone getting hurt (probably DH) by teh silage gas. Fortunately the silo unloaded into a bunk separated from the barn. The earlier silos opened directly into the cow stable in the bottom of bank barn, where the silo gas (heavier than air) would have collected.

DH had some close calls working in and aroudn teh silo.

I'm kinda glad we don't do that anymore ...
Let's be careful out there!

Ann

[JeffNY]

Yeah corn silage is nasty, and deadly. Grass silage is nothing like corn silage, there are "fumes", but it is nothing like corn. We use a Van-Dale unloader, very well built unloaders. The blower was a pain in the arse Thursday, started blowing at 11, it took till 3 before the 2 loads were empty. The band has a crack near the chute, and we are having it welded friday. Going to get a new band, so the darn thing gets me by, and it will be a backup. I am going to look for a gehl 1540, looked at a new holland. I like the whirl-a-feed, but he was asking too much for it. Thing was a 1987, had some rust on it, and one part needed oil. He was asking 2500, I offered 1500, because of that rust, plus goodluck selling it. Most people around here use a trench.



Jeff