DAIRYMEN TURN TO SILAGE

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27107, 1 August 1953, Page 5

DAIRYMEN TURN TO SILAGE

Feed For Winter Assured THREATENING SITUATION RELIEVED No section of Canterbury farmers was given more anxiety by the wet spring and early summer than the town supply dairymen on whom Christchurch depends for milk. They found themselves with very heavy crops of grass, but unable to make hay. In many cases the winter fodder crops such as chou moellier and fodder beet were drowned out, and the winter feed position looked serious. A number of these farmers, more or less in desperation, turned to silage as an answer to their problems, and though for most of them silage was a new venture, all appear to be so satisfied with it that they will make silage a regular part of their winter feeding programme from now on. To enable an. exchange of views and experience, the Halswell branch, of Federated Farmers recently organised visits to each others’ farms by a number of farmers who had made silage for the first time. It was a most useful day, and everyone who took part declares that he learned a lot, including two farmers who have made silage for years, and who were included in the party so that ,they could give the benefit of their experience. In nearly every case these Halswell farmers turned to silage more or less as a last resort. Some made silage from grass already cut but lying out still wet after a week or more. Some made it from grass well past the stage which it is usually regarded as at its best for silage. Some made it from grass or lucerne in the right stage. Their experiences showed that, though it may be a matter of care to make the very best silage, it is not easy to go wrong with putting uo grass in a form' which dairy cows find palatable, and on which they continue to milk reasonably well. Since silage began to demonstrate its possibilities in Canterbury three or four years ago, most farmers have thought principally of pits for storing it. Much of Canterbury is ideal for pits, because almost every farm can iind some shingly place where the water table is low, where silage can be stored without fear of wetting. Pits are easy to make, as they require only a few hours work with a dulldozer, and in much Canterbury shingly subsoil they have a reasonably long life before the sides begin to crumble in. Their great virtue is that they are easy to fill either with a buckrake or a forage harvester, and the filling reduces the extra work needed to give consolidation for control of heating. High Water Table

Town supply dairymen are in general on much heavier soils than the average farmer, and pits present obvious difficulties. The most obvious is flooding. Very few farmers in the Halswell district, for instance, could dig pits, because the water table is high, and the land lies wet through the winter. The most successful answer to this problem seems to be the earth walls by a Waikuku farmer. He used cleanings from his drains, bulldozed up to parallel walls 10 feet thieve at the base, 3ft to 6ft high, and two feet broad at the top. This pair of walls was about 15 feet apart, and 35 yards long, and held a huge stack of about 500 tons of really excellent silage. The material used was ordinary pasture, a crop of oats and tares, lucerne, and a crop of Phalaris and clover.

Silage has been made on this farm for 15 years or more, and has been put up in stacks, in a wooden silo, and in pits. The earth wall seems to be the best method. A lot of ingenuity was displayed in making it. One of the difficulties on heavy land is that ground about the silage supply is liable to be badly cut up when the silage is being carted during the winter. This stack was sited on a road, so that much carting can be done along the road where there is no question of damage. It was filled from the paddocks, and. to make filling easier, an earth ramp running up from the paddock to a back wall was made. The material was carted in trailers up the ramp, put into the pit, and the tractor and trailer taken through the pit. out on to the road, and back into the paddock again. The going was easy at all times, filling quick, and most of the consolidation needed, was obtained automatically. The back wall of this pit was made fairly high and sipped at about the limit for safe negotiation with the tractor and trailers. An ingenious arrangement of the road end -of the pit was the use of a wooden wall a couple of feet high against which the pit was finished off to give a good face to work on when the pit was first opened. It also probably saved some of the waste entailed in making a tongue to take the implements. This walled clamp was filled from 100 acres of material, and took about six weeks to fill. The crop was generally cut the evening before it was put into the clamp, and then picked up and chopped, and blown into fourwheeled trailers. It was not always possible to wilt for a night, but at least three hours was always allowed between mowing and picking up. Experience has shown that fourwheel trailers are better on this farm than two-wheelers. There is less danger of bogging the vehicle in loose material, and when the sides are built up above the earth walls, as they are to a heigh of four to six feet of made silage, there is less danger of a trailer or tractor capsizing off the stack. Little Waste The top of this clamp was not covered. It .was rolled for about 14 days. The operation was completely successful, and not more than two inches at the top are waste. There is no waste at all on the sides below the walls, and an inch or so only on the sides above the walls. On such a big quantity of silage, the percentage of waste is minute.

A dairy herd of 9o' to 100 cows confirms the impressions that this is good silage. They eat it readily, more readily in fact than an excellent sample of lucerne hay. At times early in the feeding out, the silage ration had to be cut down to make sure the cows took ehough hay. They have milked well on the silage and hay, and half an hour a day on a greencrop oats paddock. Feeding out takes two men about two hours each day. The cows are rationed by forkfuls. It was found that guessing the required quantity by the size of the load on the trailer was liable to result in waste when too much was put out, or lower milk yields when too little was given, and the two men feeding out now count forkfuls as they load. A Burwood farmer has one pit made with concrete walls above ground, and another pit. dug in sand, and lined with asbestos cement roofing, sheets to stabilise the sides. He has made stack silage for years, and believes that the cows do not go for the pit silage as well as they did for the stack. They eat it quite readily, and milk well on it, but do not seem to relish it as much as the old silage. The saving of labour justifies the pit method thoroughly. The writer encountered in England farmers who insisted that impervious walls for pits were liable to cause a lot of waste unless the pit could be roofed, and both these Burwood pits with impervious sides seemed to show rather more waste than might have been expected. There was waste along the shoulders of both, possibly where water had collected, ana, being unable to run into the ground through the concrete, ran into the silage and rotted it. The roofing sheet sides were easy to damage when trailers were run through the pit in filling, or backed in when feeding out, and this damage was liable to let in air and spoil the silage. In neither case was the waste great, but a pit with impervious sides might show (a lot of damaged silage if it was left for some

years. This farmer had used an old differential and brake assembly to arrange a most ingenious and simple means of spreading out the load of material as it was dropped in the pits. The spreader could be worked by the tractor driver, with a great saving of labour during filling. A piU> at Halswell made above ground with metal aeroplane wings for sides again seemed, to indicate that impervious sides may lead to waste. An additional factor in this case was that the pit was made too narrow, and the tractor and trailer were

restricted in their moyement about the top of the stack. Consolidation was excellent along the wheel tracks, but there was insufficient consolidation between the wheel marks, and along the sides. This stack showed two types of waste—one from rotting next to the metal sides, and the other from overheating where there was too little consolidation. Nevertheless, this farmer, who made silage this season as a desperate measure and without much faith, is a confirmed silage man now. His caws eat it well, and have milked well on it. The answer next season, he says, is more silage. Another Halswell pit, dug into loess along the crest of a flat spur, again shows the effect of making a pit too narrow. Once again, there is over consolidation along the wheel tracks, and too little along the edges and in the centre. A second mistake here is that the back of the pit is so placed that a lot of surface drainage must run on to the pit, and there is waste on the top and along the sides. Here again, the silage has turned out well, though it was the farmer’s first experience with it, and the cows relish it and do well cn it. Labour Requirement

Another Halswell farmer has made stacks silage for several years and up to this season was not particularly interested in other methods. His objections to pit or clamp silage were that pits on his heavy land were out .of the question, and that a lot of Expensive machinery appeared to be necessary to make pit silage. His stacking required a crop lifter and a grab only, but the team needed for stacking is six men. Casual labour for this sort of work is invariably hard to get, and often most inefficient. Yet he has put up many hundreds of tons of stack silage each year, and relies on it as his main winter feed. He is careful about building the stack as evenly packed as possible, and well consolidated by tramping round the edges. An important point is that he rakes the sides carefully, as the stack is being built, to remove loose material, and to ensure that the fibres are slanting downward to turn rain He makes really first-class silage with insignificant waste. He has to use earth on top, of course, but has access to a cheap supply of mixed soil and stones which he uses in gateways when it comes off the stack. After having seen the possibilities of the above-ground pit, or walled clamp, he is seriously considering turning to this method, which would get him over his pressing labour difficulty. The method seems to have a great deal to recommend it. and not only on heavy land. The life of a/pit in most parts of Canterbury is limited to the time the walls will stand up to the bumping of loading and feeding out, and to weathering when empty. Sheathing the sides with concrete sprayed on to wire netting is a possibility where a permanent site is desirable, but at present it is an expensive operation. More, also, needs to be known of the effects of impervious walls where the top of the pit is not roofed. These farmers who were forced into silage this year have learned a number of lessons. They agree that silage is reasonably easy to make, and easy enough to feed out. Most of them took to silage in to save a desperate situation, but will make it a principal winter feed from now on. It is certain that with the usual enterprise New. Zealand farmers show in these matters, and the exchange of ideas at least this one group of farmers is keen to carry on, a few years will see many labour-saving ideas applied to making and feeding out silage.