WARNING- Avalanche Possible!

Profile Picture of Post's Author Jordan Hunt | Posted February 5, 2024

For many of you, feeding new crop corn silage started by now, but maybe a few have the luxury to still be using 2022 crop year corn silage. It’s a wonderful thing if you can at least make it to Christmas time before opening new crop corn silage because of all the benefits related to prolonged fermentation and increasing starch availability. Today, I want to provide a brief update on what our team is seeing with new crop corn silage across different regions.

The one common complaint has been silage collapses/avalanches that result in days’ worth of feed falling from the silage face. Not only is this a major safety threat but this also causes decreased nutrient value from feed being exposed to air for longer than normal time. I think we all understand the danger associated with this, but I do want to remind us all that this can happen in a split second and be deadly. Please remember these few pointers when working around silage piles:

  • Use a buddy system when working near the pile and managing the plastic. In the event something happens, then one person can call for help. Alert other teammates when people are working on the silage pile.
  • Deface silages so the top of the face is pitched back 2-3 feet from the base. This helps prevent large clumps of feed from falling. Please remember with typical silage, we have 65% moisture product piled 20’, 30’, and sometimes higher, so there is a lot of water weight hanging at the top.
  • Avoid taking a bucket to the face and loosening it to get extra silage if not enough was defaced that day. Either deface more or if space allows, do a side-scrape with wheel loader bucket.
  • Reassess packing density to ensure harvest procedure was done correctly. This isn’t something that can be fixed now but can prevent repeating the issue for next harvest. We should be able to hit greater than 20#DM/cu ft packing density.

Shifting gears a bit from safety, mycotoxins are commonly looked to if we are experiencing abnormal cow health and/or repro performance on herd. Somewhat like an avalanche in the sense that things unravel a bit, you want to get ahead of it before much bigger issues arise. Fortunately, this year appears that most areas have had a fairly clean silage harvest. I am seeing very low to no toxin levels detected in 2023 corn silage in NE IA, SE MN, and SW WI. However, our group has recently found high levels of toxins in corn sources in NE WI which is a bit of curveball, so be alert and test if in question.

We have testing options and resources available through our Clean Feed module in FeedFIT®. My best practice for checking is to pull a TMR sample within a few hours of feed drop. This way you know exactly what the cows are consuming. Then, sample any suspected feeds to understand the main sources of contamination. These are typically your grain and grass sources of the diet – corn, corn silage, earlage/snaplage and high moisture corn. Some commodities like gluten and distillers are also worth checking if in question of the source. Repeat if suspect levels show up on the analysis to ensure it’s real or if it was a one-off event.

Please be safe out there and remember to be aware of your surroundings when working with large silage piles. Cheers to a great year!

You can find a PDF of this blog post here.

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