Silage

I will say this, had the big round bales come along 5 years sooner, before I built silos and bought equipment, I don't think there would ever been silage on my farm. Silage takes a lot of hp per ton of feed. In 1967 I could have bought a second square baler with thrower, but could never have found the labour to run two balers. In 1967 I could very easily have kept my square baler with thrower and added a round baler. That would have reduced my labour requirments.

If I lived in a climate where weather is not a factor for drying hay, for me silage would never happen, be it tower silos, bunker silos, wraped bales, big bags, etc. The goal of making money is to get that feed from field to feed bunk at the lowest possible cost. The lowest possible cost I have seen in the past 40 years has been the round baler.

Plastic bags - need all the silage cutting and hauling labor but a little faster to fill a bag - to me the downside is all the unusable plastic you are buying every year

If you can put hay up in bale form it will keep a long time (especially indoors here in the midwest with snow and 25" of rain) with little additional expense - PLUS you are not hauling around all that water in the haylage

In my opinion a properly sized bunker is the way to go - keep it covered - easy labor in - easy labor out - an overall best solution....

have you read about a lacerator and vacuum silage?

also one more thing about oat silage (they do make good silage) a silage operation is only once a year - but haying is three or four times per year - some of those times are definitely in the wet part of the year.....

Makes great silage in the film. Just have to put them where you aim to leave them. Grasses (and wheat/rye) ensile the best, and will keep 2 years. Alfalfa and soybeans only last about a year. The high calcium in the plants buffers the fermintation too much.

Tall vertical silos were probably easier to unload & feed out with low power requirements (a fork or a 5hp electric motor) which is kind of what was available to many of us from the 50s - 70s. As livestock operations got bigger in the late 80s it took too many silos, and they were not flexable enough to keep up with expansion.

Bunker, or big flat concrete, silos had their days when the round silos were becoming too small & inflexable, but the plastic bags hadn't come into their own yet. Properly managed they work well for a big operation, but the top likes to spoil without _real_ good management, and you need to feed a lot of critters to keep the front wall fresh - feed out fast enough.

There are some round bales individually wrapped for silage, but seems expensive & time consuming & too easy to puncture the plastic as you move them. And some bales are stuffed in long bags, but it is difficult to seal up & get the air out, so there is more spoilage - mold.

The upright silos will be used as long as they are good, but the future around here are plastic bags stuffed with raw silage. Low initial expense, very flexable for how much you need to store this year, small cross section so it doesn't spoil as you feed out, and easy to locate where you need it for that year. And if you don't poke a hole in them, they keep pretty well, low spoilage. We now have the hp & equipment to stuff the silage into them & to dig it back out again with skidsteers & the like.

Perhaps in your dry & warmer climate you could graze the livestock much longer, and harvest dry crops. Here in the midwest where we have 6 months of real cold winter & snow, and 30+ inches of rain over summer, we needed ways to harvest & store crops for long periods even if they were wet?

--->Paul