Feeding maize silage in winter: Setting the herd up for success
As I write this article, we have just had our first frost in the Waikato, a change in weather signalling that winter is upon us.
Nelson Pyper runs a dairy grazing property in Southland running 450 heifer calves and 450 R2s on 160ha.
Last season Nelson set up a wintering barn, in which he now also houses his heifers during the summer months.
While it isn’t common for dairy grazers to feed heifers in this way, Piper says feeding supplements to the young stock is a useful way to maintain pasture quality, especially in early summer when the region is prone to wet conditions. “Heifers tend to walk up and down a bit when eating, that’s why feeding out supplement in the barn is so much more important. The animals seem to do better as well.”
Pyper grows 130ha of silage, cut three times a year, and until four months ago was worried about how much of the nutritional value of the stack was wasted by forks. “Forks loosen the stack and let the quality of the silage deteriorate; that’s the biggest problem with silage in the stack.”
“It’s stupid going to the trouble of making good silage then letting it deteriorate because the forks you’re using lets air into the stack because its loose.”
Pyper bought a BvL Top Star silage block cutter to combat this and says the difference in the silage stack has been remarkable. “It takes a slab out of the stack and the face is still as hard as a rock. It’s effectively cutting out all that waste.”
In contrast to standard shear grabs and silage grabs that dig in and drag feed away from the stack, the BvL Top Star slices a clean block downwards from the top of the stack, using a double blade-scissor action, preventing air from getting to the rest of the stack.
Webbline says with this method, there is no levering action on the loader, resulting in almost zero wastage on the stack face. Pyper’s stock manager Alan Pyper says it is a lot easier on the loader and he easily cuts out 1000kg of silage each time, meaning less trips to fill his mixer wagon.
A 1.65m3 silage block cutter needs very little oil flow which can easily be supplied by most tractor and loader hydraulic systems.
Pyper says the farm’s 90hp Merlo loader barely breaks a sweat when loading silage.
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