Walking in the Furrow
Over the years when we still had the dairy cows, Labor Day weekend was always the barometer for determining the ideal time frame to start chopping corn silage. 2016 was the last year we harvested corn silage and was the first time we compressed it in a long, white plastic Ag-Bag. It made for some excellent feed and, best of all, we could scoop it up with the skid steer. We didn't have to pitch it out the silo door and down the silo chute with a four-tine fork.
As a child I will never forget the cardio workout as we climbed up and down the slippery, cold, icy steel rebar steps fastened to the wood doors of the stave silos. We also had a shorter stave silo that lost its roof dome in the Palm Sunday tornado. We always made a point of emptying this one first because the silo was exposed to the harsh weather of Mother Nature, and usually resulted in throwing a foot of snow down the chute first. We came down to shovel it outside the feed room and then climbed back up 11 doors to fork out the silage each morning.
In 1976, the Clark Brothers erected the new North Liberty silo that measured 16-by-68 and assembled a new 16 foot P&D silo unloader that was suspended from a long cable up to the tripod and back down the outside of the silo to a hand-crank winch inside the feed room. The P&D silo unloader emptied the silo with the push of a button as it fed the dense packed silage into a blower that funneled it out through the silo door and down the enclosed silo chute to feed the cows below. Unfortunately, the silo unloader reached its end of life before 2015, so Dad replaced it with a new four-tine pitch fork each year. The North Liberty silo still towers over the farm today and managed to survive the tornado in 2017 that destroyed the feed bunk below and left the shorter silo nearby in a pile of rubble.
If you have never harvested high-moisture corn silage and blown it up into a silo, it yields corn juice similar to that of a cider press. I remember the days gone by when the cows would congregate around the base of the silo after they had been milked to get a sip of corn-squeezed juice from the silo on their way out to the pasture. Before we started filling silo, we always dumped whole oats in the forage blower first. This polished the inside of the fill pipe, and decreased the chances of plugging the fill pipe. There is nothing more exciting than hanging off the edge of a silo ladder rung like a monkey at over 30 feet above the ground tapping on the vertical fill pipe, while trying to dislodge a slug of silage packed in the pipe.
A quick reminder during silage harvest, remember to stay out of the feed room and provide extra ventilation in the days during and following the silo-filling process to avoid being overcome by the hidden dangers of silage gas! If you must enter the silo or the feed room always pump fresh air in with a forage blower running before you enter. Silo-filler disease is a term given to an injury resulting from exposure to silo gas. Inhaling even a small amount can result in serious, permanent or fatal lung injury.