AG Bags

I see them in use at many farms. Many of these farms have bunker silos and round bales also. I know that it takes different feeds to build the TMR, but I wonder about the waste in feeding out of the Ag Bags. It seems to me that you would be left with a big pile of mixed feed and torn pieces of plastic that it would take so much work to clean up that it would just get pushed into a bigger and bigger pile. How does that work?

They aren?t bad at all as far as waste you do have to do a little
shovel and pitch fork work to clean up around the edges
biggest thing don?t rip the bottom of the bag by spinning thr
wheels of the loader

I have used ag bags many times over the years.
There isn?t really all that much waste, but site
location and good management make a big
difference in how happy you are with bagging
silage. If you open a bag in early winter, before the
ground is frozen, and create a bunch of muddy ruts.
Once frozen, you will get to bounce over those ruts
all winter. Best results are had if you are going to
use ag bags every year, to pour a concrete pad to
place the bag on. No more mud, and no worries
about digging into the ground underneath the bag,
while getting silage. Best part of bags are. Low
capital investment, no building permit, and if your
farm needs change and you no longer need storage
for silage, you don?t have a near worthless tower
silo standing in your yard. Another advantage of
using a ag bag is, if you don?t like were you put it
this year, put it in a different location next year. Last
bag I had held around 375 tons of corn silage

Lots of bag remnants left around this farm even tho there
hasn't been any used in most of a decade. Last year the
neighbors fence has a significant sized piece stuck in it that
must have come from here even tho I thought I had it all
picked up.

I bought my own bagger when we started milking cows in 94. Between my use and custom work we have done hundreds of bags. With a little management there is very little waste to a silage bag. We always had a stone pad with a solid base to put ours on. When feeding you let the bottom plastic long and cut the side plastic every few days. With a skid loader there is very little hand work maybe just shovel in the edges once or twice a week. Like mentioned below the issue is when you tear the bottom back under the feed when scooping in. Just makes for more work untill you get back past that spot.I feel there is much more waste to a silo than a bag. Every time I open a silo I end up removing 2-3 feet of spoiled feed(even with a plastic cover as it seems that rats,mice or a coon always tears it up). A silo unloader is so much slower than scooping out of a bag and if it does not work you need to fix or fork. We have a skid loader and a loader tractor for bags.We also like the bags in that we have unlimited storage and two people can harvest silage. A bunker takes a third person to pack and then the big job of covering.I have a small herd of beef cows so we do feed out of a silo in the summer as the unloader takes a nice even layer of feed off each day. With the bags the loader will disturb the face and makes much harder to keep feed when only feeding a small amount it hot weather. Tom

I started using bags in 1978 and still have a bagger. You can be very neat about it or you can make a mess. My thought is the cost of land, seed, equipment used in production, harvest and storage of that feed; I certainly was not going to waste it by being careless taking it out of storage.