Corn silage?

Well, due to late planting and drought, my corn is about done in. Neighbors who also have corn planted have said only option now is to chop for silage, and soon. They have silos, but I need to store mine on the ground between round bales. My question is how deep should the silage be when storing it? Also, what should I use to cover it? Fleet Farm has silage covers for about $350, but I was told the plastic on a roll will work fine and be much cheaper. Thoughts? Thanks for advice.

The deeper the better, in a trench if you can, but at least 5 or 6' deep. If you use bales, be careful when packing. As far as a cover, plastic is nice, and just a roll of silo plastic is enough with some tires to hold it down. I haven't used a cover for years, though. Right after a final pack, I spread two or three bushels of feed wheat over the top. It will start to grow in a couple of days and create a thick root mass which cuts of the air as well as plastic, is much cheaper, and the cows eat it just as well as the silage. As a matter of fact, they seem to seek it out when I feed.

Does anyone in your area custom bag? I started bagging several years ago and it has made life a lot easier. As far as putting it on the ground it depends on how you do it, if you build ''trench'' walls with your round bales and a little dirt around the edges then you can go as high as you can safely pack the forage with whatever tractor you use to pack it, the height of the round bales plus top it off. If you make a pile and cover it then you want to cone it up so that the weight of the silage helps pack itself and also to reduce surface area and limit spoilage, you may be able to rent a vaccum pump and then you can lay down diagonal PVC field line pipe with holes in it before starting the pile and vaccum it down when you cover. The grade of plastic really depends on how long the piles will be there, if you are going to feed it out this winter you'll most likely be good, also, most of the silage covers are fitted and if you go with the pile you will probably have more than one pile. I have ensiled droughted corn before and I had to add water to get the moisture level high enough and added around 150 pounds of ground shell corn per ton to get the starch and feed value where it was worthwhile.

The better question is how much waste are you comfortable with??? A pile between round bales covered with a cheap plastic will have 15-20% spoilage. Have the round bales hold a ground piece of good heavy plastic and cover it with a good thick sunlight blocking silo plastic and the waste goes down to around 10%. A good silage bag can easily have under 5% waste.

Things to conceder:

1) What moisture is your corn silage going to be??? The dryer the more important a good air tight pack/seal is.

2) What are you going to be feeding the silage to??? Dairy cows need good quality feed. Beef brood cows can be feed lower quality feed. Beef steers can be feed lower quality feed when balanced with other feed sources.

3) Do you have the equipment to harvest corn silage??? IF not what is the going rate in your area for harvesting corn silage? Custom operators can charge by the hour or the load. Also can you get them when you need them.

4) If there are any silage baggers you can rent or hire in your area the feed quality and storage ease will by far make up for any additional cost over a bale bunker.

5) Are you set up to feed silage??? This could just be some fed bunks you fill with a loader. You do not have to have fancy feeders. Several guys around me just use old tractor tires with the top bead cut out of them.

Just trying to point out things to think about as it sounds like you do not usually feed corn silage.

I think when Dad feeds corn out of the bag, it's around 1% waste. It's good from top to bottom, front to back, and side to side. Only issue is hail, which we got hit with last year to a degree. Was mostly hay in the bags, and there was more spoilage even after taping. Still no where near 15% though.

My vote is to bag it. We've been bagging the majority of our corn for quite some time now and they love it.

Donovan from Wisconsin

The two guys in my county who are making big bucks on cattle bag both corn silages and haylage.

Bag are good But next best is to pile on the ground and cover it with white plastic and use a windrow of dirt around it to hold the plastic down. I put up a pile 60 x 100 every year and My brothers 60 x 250 every year and I'll bet between all 3 of us we don't have a truck load go to waste. we also use a preservative . The only spoilage we have is if you don't feed off of the end even ya need to feed off of the full width of the pile.

I would say forget the bales, hard to pack agin the bales and achieve the air tight seal silage requires. Least cost is a pile on the ground that you can drive over from every angle , and cover with a tight fitting plastic . 6ml black plastic will work fine, white one side black the other is best. locate your pile on a rise or at least some where water will not "ru" to the pile. lots of tires to hold down plastic on top of pile and brup the edges. The deeper you can make your pile the better Remember air is your enemy,and you need to limit esposed surface area, and squeeze out as much air as you can while packing. Bags a great but do cost,and so does the rental of the bagger. All depends on what you can afford. I have piled,bagged, and built a pit, myself. al will work if managed right.Show us some ppictures of your stored feed, when you are done. Bruce

What Bruce said,

Forget the bales and get to it. One thing tho, be prepared for water runoff if it is still green.

Allan

I agree with Bruce and Allan, real tough to pack against and seal to round bales. The two most important things are to keep air out, and minimize surface area. Another consideration is nitrate level. Drouthy corn can have dangerously high nitrate level which would need to be addressed before feeding.

Thanks for all the information. To answer some of the questions addressed. I dont know of a bagger for rent anywhere in our area. What few guys that make silage still use the upright silos. I suppose St. cloud area has baggers for rent but that is about 60 miles from me. This silage would be fed to my beef cows simply to get something out of it. Only second year raising corn, plan was to pick the ears and grind them for steer feed like last year, but that's not going to happen with most of my 12 acres I planted. Drought is getting to it fast and no real chance of rain in the forecast. Have had no rain since June when it finally quit raining so we could plant it! Talk about one extreme to another. Yes I do have equipment to harvest my own silage. Its all old, slow, but in good shape, so no extra cost there. Basically I can do it all, just need to be sure I am doing it right as I have never stored silage. Last year I green chopped every day for a month or so and fed it to the cows to help their milk production for their calves when pasture was short.
Bruce, thanks for the photos, and thanks to all others for their thoughts and information. I will let you guys know how it goes. Hope to be well on my way buy the end of the weekend.

We got into the corn silage in a bunker due to the upright silo becoming unsafe . And it was a hurry up deal the first year . A friend and customer of mine had his old tile silo crack as it was a glazed tile one and he went and rented a dozer thinking he could run it he found out that he was no dozer operator and he came and asked if i could run a dozer as he only had it for two days . So i went up to help . What he had rented was nothing more then a glorified garden tractor on tracks . The ground was hard clay and the tonka toy dozer would only scrape it and make dust. To speed up this operation i had him use his chisel plow to sort rip the clay and this way we could move dirt . we made the first trench forty feet wide and 150 fifty feet long and eight feet deep then as we filled it when we got to the top of the dirt we put round bales along side and backed them up with two more rows of bales to hold them and put plastic down over the bales . The pile ended up at around fourteen feet high and worked sorta ok the first year . The next year we reworked it and made it bigger and poured a 8 inch concert floor and this helped a bunch each year we make changes and improvements in the bunkers and with equipment . we built the bunkers into a hill side since we have lots of them handy here.

If you could get a dozer in there and cut a trench into a hillside it would cut down on the spoilage.

I am guessing, but our old trench was 14' to 16' wide, and probably 50-60' long. 8' deep at the deepest.

The neighbor dug it in a few hours. We used it for probably 8 or 9 years, then built an upright, concrete stave one.

Good luck, Gene

You don't know of a bagger, that doesn't mean they don't exist. Start asking around.

When Dad rented a bagger, they delivered it, loaded the bag on it, and picked it up when he was done.

Since a bagger is not available, my thought was to do what m w j says- it works very well. When I piled I used a blower or just drove over the top to unload. Driving over was simple, didn"t get stuck, and it packed well. Toss the plastic over the top, plow a furrow on each side and push dirt onto the edge of the plastic to seal. Very little spoilage. If you need tires for the topside, I can donate dozens!

With only 12 acres of corn, try this. Go to your local feed and supply store. Get a fairly large piece of silo cover plastic. Place a line of round bales side to side to mark the area you want to use to store your crop, about fifteen to twenty feet wide and fifty or seventy feet long. lay your silo plastic down the middle and lap the extra over the bales and leave it outside of them. Fill and pack the area inside of the bales as high as you can, then fold the extra plastic over the top to seal the silage. That should minimize your spoilage and be cheap enough to be affordable. It will keep the crop off the ground and can be cut away as you feed it out. Just another idea....

Some good ideas in the previous posts. If possible try to find a custom bagger or rental.
One thing we ran into years ago was bad drainage in heavy clay. If you do not have gravel spot and good drainage available, haul gravel in.
Forget the round bales. Use a pit or well covered pile. Do not skimp on the cover and we found it best to use cut tires. Last thing pack in layers and do not just pile it in. This of course depends what you are going to use it for. More packing obviusly higher quality. Good luck it can be done if you think ahead. At first we did not always think ahead.

Some years when we had more corn silage than our upright concrete stave silos would hold, we piled silage on top of the ground, sometimes on bare earth, other times on old plastic ( 6 mil black poly) saved from a previous silage cover usage.
A couple of times I placed a row of firewood logs or old power poles end to end lengthwise on both sides of the area to be piled on and pushed up earth against the logs to hold them in place. Then I placed an eight or ten foot wide piece of plastic over the logs with about two feet (which would be under the silage area) and let the rest lay out on the ground beside the log. The silage pile was then filled either with self unloading wagons driven through and on the pile as much as possible or unloaded at the end and silage pushed up on the pile with tractor and loader. Piles were about five or six feet deep. After pile was completed by tractor packing and some hand smoothing the side plastic pieces were placed up the sloping sides of the pile and then the new cover piece was placed. It was wide enough to cover over the logs too. We were careful to leave a small depression in the silage pile just at the edge of the log. After the top cover was installed, sand was dumped on top of the cover plastic in this depression as a weight. Tires were then used to thoroughly cover the entire sloping sides and as much of the top as we had tires for. One end of the pile had logs across it and had the sand on it. The other end which was opened for feed out just had a pile of sand dumped on the cover piece. When we emptied the pile during a fair weather period in mid winter, it was all loaded on wagons and blown into an upright silo. There was not more than a wheel barrow load of spoiled silage in about 80 tons. The last pile that we made was only about 20 tons or so and I used some old junk round bales, on the flat side, in a U shape. Plastic was draped down the bales and onto the floor of the area just as I did with the log sided piles before. Silage was pushed into the area with tractor and loader. At feed-out there was some spoilage discovered where mice had cut the plastic where they could hide in the cavities between the bales. I wished that I had pictures of some of these piles but it was before I got a digital camera and computer.

I have read of piles being covered with plastic, the entire edges being covered with dirt, and then a vacuum pump used to remove all air from the sealed pile through a pipe under the edge of the dirt covered plastic. Picture I saw showed a shrink wrapped looking heap with no tires used for weights.

If you have a bit of a slope (hillside) and a loader tractor, you can dig a pit silo. That is what I did. It took most of the day, two buckets wide and maybe 50 ft long. Dumped the stuff removed along side of the pit to make it deeper. Works well for a short day of work....
You want the floor to slope out of the end otherwise water will stand inside and make mud...

You will use the loader tractor to push the silage into the pit and once in, drive on it to pack it.