Full Season Cover: Silage Tips
Written by: Owen Taylor
First off, thanks to everyone who took the time to read my short blog on putting the Full Season Cover up as dry feed. Although more and more producers are putting up the Full Season Cover as dry feed I would guess that at least 50% of the acres are still put as silage.
Image: George & I checking Full Season Cover harvest timing.
Silage offers two huge benefits over dry feed:
High feed quality
Gives you the ability to “cheat” that cranky old Mother Nature by having the swath exposed for way less time than waiting for it to dry down.
I’ll start off by touching on a few things I’ve learned when making bale silage. In my experience, the Full Season Cover should be put up at a max of 60% moisture, with 45-55% being ideal when going into a bale. I have done bale silage at 65%, and although it still made good feed there was significantly more spoilage. On my farm, we achieve this by cutting one morning with a discbine and crimping aggressively and baling it the following afternoon (cut Monday morning, bale Tuesday afternoon for example). The amount of biomass the crop has and the weather conditions can affect this somewhat as well. If it’s cloudy the moisture in the swath won’t drop as much. If it’s not a thick stand (drought conditions) the moisture could easily be down to 35% by the following day, but a good rule of thumb is to let it wilt in the swath for at least 30 hours.
One major benefit of putting up silage in a bale vs. a pitt is that even if the swath is down to 25% moisture it will still ensile and make good feed. Simply put if it won’t keep as a dry bale, it has enough moisture to ensile. So you have a few days grace to put up good feed. The important thing to remember is that the lower the moisture the lower the feed quality. This doesn’t mean it will be poor quality, it means that the lower the moisture the closer to dry feed quality it will be.
If your swath is down to 25% and the forecast looks good it would probably be a good idea to wait till it was dry or use a preservative on the swath instead of spending the extra cost on silage plastic. When it comes to making good silage oxygen is your enemy. The tighter you can make your bales the better. The weight of bale I aim for is 1800 lbs.
The size of your bale to achieve this will depend on a few things:
Moisture
Size of baler
Your loader tractor will tell you if you’ve made them too big! So start on the smaller side and work your way up. I have only used an “inline” wrapper on my farm and only an Anderson at that. I believe all inline wrappers have an adjustment for how much resistance the wrapper will apply when it’s wrapping/moving. It’s very important that each bale is being pressed against the previous bale very hard to stop mould growth from occurring on the face of the bales. I have made this mistake. Again, oxygen is your enemy and any space left at all will have oxygen.
I personally have never chopped and packed silage and I’m not a politician so I don’t give advice on something I don’t know anything about (*cough cough JT) so I reached out to my good friend Darcy Stewart who has lots of experience chopping the Full Season.
Image: Darcy Stewart of Clearwater, Manitoba
“It’s important to take your time and make sure it’s packed really well. Ideally its chopped within 48hrs of being cut with a swather. The dryer it is the more it will need to be packed for maximum quality. Get it tarped as soon as possible. If you don’t use the entire pile by spring I feel it’s well worth the extra cost to buy more tarp and re cover and seal up well”.
-Darcy Stewart
Silage chopped and put in a pit can be done at a higher moisture but generally speaking, it is recommended to keep it below 70%. Again as Darcy states the importance of packing, is all about getting as much oxygen out as possible. If you follow the same protocols you use for putting up oat or barley greenfeed you’ll have good success.
One last thing to touch on when it comes to making silage out of the Full Season is the huge benefit of a very wide silage window compared to a mono-crop. The Full Season has several species that grow low in the canopy. Because of limited sunlight, they stay vegetative for the entire growing season and therefore maintain a high moisture level and feed quality.
For example, our dairy customers often take the Full Season “early” at about 50 days post-germination when all the plants are young and vegetative. Because of this, they will see protein levels of 16-18%.
The vast majority of producers will take the Full Season for silage at 60 days post-germination and achieve 13-15% protein.
Still, some producers who aren’t needing that high of protein levels will wait until 70-75 days post-germination when the cereals are getting close to ripe. They will see protein levels of 10-12%.
In each of these scenarios, producers will still easily be able to achieve 60% moisture levels because of those vegetative plants growing low in the canopy.
That is at least a 3-week silage window compared to approximately a 7-day window with a monocrop. This is very handy when dealing with the aforementioned cranky old girl who might decide for no reason to give you 7 days of rain in a row.
I should mention that the later you cut the Full Season, the less regrowth you will have so keep that in mind when making your decision on silage timing.
Silage is an excellent way to ensure that you put up the best feed quality possible in the shortest amount of time possible and there is nothing better than being done a field and not having a whole bunch of bales to pick! I hope this information can help make some decisions on your farm easier. As I said in the last blog. No one knows your own farm and what is best for your operation better than you!
As always please reach out to me with any questions!
OWEN TAYLOR