welcome to this morning's webinar the third in the silage series on harvesting and storage
i'm sophia cusick of the education team in communication stakeholder engagement at the department of planning industry
and environment and i'll be your host for today i'd like to acknowledge that as we are meeting across the state in this virtual
space each of us stand upon the lands of many different nations i'm meeting on gadigal land and i'd like
to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land and waterway of the urination and pay my respects to their elders past
and present and emerging i'd also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands and
waters on which our online audiences are joining for us from and pay respects to their elders past present
and emerging and extend that to any first nations colleagues and guests joining us i'd now like to hand over to
sue street livestock senior land services officer within the central west local land services to formally
introduce the session thanks for that so on behalf of local land services we welcome you all today
to this webinar as it was just said this is the third of our
webinar series and today we will cover harvesting and storage
so this series of webinars is brought to you by local land services and in particular the ag extension teams from
across the state so once again i'm joined by john pilch of new south wales dpi who has partnered
partnered with us to share his wealth of knowledge and experience in this area as part of this webinar series so john
is a livestock research officer at new south wales dpi based down in wagga
john has more than 30 years experience in animal nutrition and photo conservation
he was the national co-coordinator of the top fighter accenture program until 2005 and is author of the successful
silage manual thank you sue good morning everyone today we're on to harvesting and storage
that's where we're up to after the last two again i just bring your attention that
a lot of the graphs and pictures and tables that we'll see today have come out of the successful solids manual so if
anybody needs to look up get more detail or refresh please just go and search it online or
see lls and they can probably organize to get your copy
during today i want to run through five particular components about harvesting
and storage making solids is quite unique in that there are very many options for
harvesting very many options for storage and a raisin range of reasons why you may have losses
or storage problems so we'll discuss all of those and then we'll follow on with
the use of additives and what may or may not be the benefits of incorporating additives into your
system so firstly foreign harvesting equipment
a number of various pieces of equipment have been used over the years but the
four pieces of equipment that you're probably most likely to deal with are precision or fine chop solid
harvesters forage wagons round ballers or square bowlers
so the first one is a precision shop for each harvester and many of the things i talk about
will relate specifically to precision chop or fine chop forage because that is where a lot of
the research has been done traditionally and where a lot of our results come from but then we'll try and extrapolate onto
bailed silages so traditional trout
forage harvester as you can see there sits on the back of a tractor has a
cutter at the front and blows material into a truck or tractor or or with a wagon for carting
it's it's probably the most common precision chop unit used on farm and it has the ability
where you have the ability to adjust the chop length from quite small up to a longer chop which you may choose
to do for example with corn silage you'll go finer with pasta salads it's more likely to cut it
around that 19 mil 20 ml and they're suitable for a range of
crops they can harvest a range of crops if we want to get a little bit bigger we now have self-propelled units
which are essentially the same except that they have very high capacity and they're used for
larger operations feedlots in particular or big dairies or areas where a lot of material needs
to be harvested in a fairly short period of time obviously are pretty much contractors
uh most people would never be able to afford a foreign harvester unless they've got a massive operation of their
own this unit that we can see is using a typical windrow front like a baler
it it similarly is can harvest a range of different crops
and we'll look at a few options shortly but the point i'd like to make about once you get into this bigger gear
it's going to take a lot more support so the forage will come off the paddock
very very quickly i mean i've seen these big semi trailers being filled
seven to ten minutes so you can imagine the amount of material move very quickly in order to put that
into the pit spread it evenly and roll it you need to have quite a number of people supporting
you otherwise it's going to be very difficult to get adequate compaction
this is a typical row front attachment you can see their heart direct cutting
sorghum grain sorghum if um if we
use a direct cut option we're looking at crops where we're not going to be wilting so
that's going to be things like maize sorghums there are other fronts available for direct cutting
which aren't designed for row crop attachments you can you can do a search online and you'll
find plenty on this kemper fronts and and various arrangements and sim front similar to the front of a
for a header that will direct directly harvest barley wheat other
cereal crops so the idea again with those they're an option for when you want to harvest
cereal type crops at about 35 to 40 dramatic content as a direct cut option
one thing we won't go into today is the option to include additional extras in your
machine they're things like kernel processors which are use for for sorghum used for corn
and they damage the grain in theory the theory being that it will release more of the starch for better
utilization and more recently there's a thing called treadlitch which
pretty much shreds my silage and and this reputedly um has an advantage in terms
of the effect of effective utilization of that product product by livestock
you may see occasionally a forage wagon these are generally lower capacity
they've got a similar windrow pickup front they chop the material as it goes into the into the wagon itself
it is a longer chop so and it's a lot less uh control so there might be materials
go through that are 10 15 ml millimeters long but there will be other
material that might be seven and a half to ten centimeters long the advantage of a forage wagon is that
whilst it's lower capacity capacity it requires less people so the same
person that harvests with a forage wagon then cuts that material and unloads out of the forage wagon into
the pit or the bone and the second person then rolls it so if two people
it is pretty um easy to to manage but your throat work rate is lower and
you do need to decide the storage pretty close to the paddock you're cutting otherwise you're going to be looking at
very long down time driving the tractor backwards and forward so cutting finding the side of the same
paddock is is probably the best option if you can
while chop silage is the traditional increasingly people are using bailers both round ballers and square
barleys and particularly in australia brown bale and square barrel silage has become
very popular and quite common i attribute that to the fact that people
have often have the equipment to handle bad silages because they're traditionally handling
hay or something similar all you really can need is a is a tractor with a set of forks on the front
and it makes it a little bit easier for people to get into the silage system
this example that we've got here is around bala which includes or incorporates our
wrapping mechanism at the same time now these are not very common but you will see them
as the valve is produced it's then moved at the back the bar is wrapped and then it's expelled out
onto that mat that you can see there and left behind a couple of points i'd like to make
about that firstly that mat is critically important because you can imagine that the stubble left behind on the
paddock is sometimes quite sharp and can very easily puncture plastic
second point is you then need to move those bowels into a point of storage which means
there is opportunity for those barrels to be further punctured by the equipment you're using
so while there are one-person operation barrel plus wrapper they do have a couple of downsides
alternatively and more commonly people in australia are going towards big square silages
particularly people in the beef and sheep industries less so perhaps in in the dairy industry
the beauty of big square bars is they have really high throughput rates higher than round bars
they are generally operated by a contractor because the machinery costs are probably at least double
the for a bala but you can handle a lot of material quickly and you
do have a much range greater range of storage options
essentially what you do is you get a baller that's that's set up
to enact to produce silage so it can cope with with wetter material and you make a
shorter bowel which whereas traditionally a bar might be eight foot long
a silage bale might be six foot five and a half foot the concept is simply that the weight of
silage is going to be much higher because it contains a proportion of water in it last week we were talking
about it's about fifty percent water fifty percent dry matter a really long barrel and a set of forks
is heavy and there's always a risk of it slumping over the edges
once we've decided the system that we want to use there are a couple of other
considerations firstly proximity to feed outside
most people would would be of the same opinion that it's much easier to cut material
to a central point that is convenient for feeding out silage
rather than cut the material to a single point and then have to transport it later for
feeding the exception obviously is forage wagons but i meant before so choose a site that's pretty centrally
located on your farm or centrally located to the areas where you will be feeding out
because you move a large amount quickly particularly with trucks if you're
making silage but if you move lose move a lot lesser amount more slowly when you're feeding out
please make sure that wherever you locate it you've got easy and safe access for the harvest and
feed out equipment don't try and ram it into a little area between trees
that may or may not have issues in terms of risk of running into them
risk of them falling on the on the pits or the bunkers and most importantly keep away from
power lines i personally have seen the situation where somebody has been carting chopped
silage to put in a bun and have been regularly doing it over the course of the day
and then at the end as the bun got a bit longer they got a little bit tight started to raise the tipper and got very
close to hitting a power line so please consider that the other thing is away from the house
if you make silage there will be an odor the silage might smell alright but the little bit of dead and decaying material
that gets left lying around won't and it will attract flies so you don't really want that
near your house the other thing is keep it away from wet or floodplain
areas now in terms of chopped solids particularly underground top silage the
problem is once water gets into the silage it becomes
unstable and it also starts to deteriorate in the case of biozygologists
flood prone is probably more of a risk where you see barrels actually washed down the river as during a flood
so keep them in a high patch of ground away from any risks obviously away from waterways that's
good but also away from underground cables fence lines anything that could cause problems later on
so we've now made our silage we've made a decision how can we store it
this is an example of a large pit silage point of this silage is it is
very very big um this is an incredibly large silage pit it's a may solid spit obviously from
an operation where they're looking at production feeding and as a result they're moving the material very very quickly
talk about that a little bit later about the importance of managing your silage or design to optimize
waste losses during feed out now in this case uh the person is using a
coverage of plastic and tyres because it is being regularly fit out it's it's essentially being used for
shorter term storage but pit silage has been chosen as the option because it
suits the the aims and the objectives of that operation
alternatively if you want to use this for long-term storage then cover it with some dirt
couple of points i would make first thing is silencers will tend to slump so when you
make your silage in a pit it is not a bad idea particularly for
longer term storage to have the silage at least as high or probably higher
than the surrounding area but then make sure there is a good layer of dirt over
the cross and i'm talking at least 30 centimeters so you want at least that 30 centimeters
foot of coverage to ensure that the plastic is protected
if you use and i just said if you use um pit silage and you and you're going to cover it
with dirt it is still important to use a layer of plastic plastic apart from your air seal
it also stops water so if you can imagine
some soils are reasonably liberally impervious to ingress boy or water or
air getting into them but others do have um do allow a certain amount of
air or a certain amount of water to penetrate them and you don't want to get that into your solid
so the plastic will help there the second point to mention is that if that material
slumps and it becomes than ground level you end up with a hollow so
if there is a hollow and no plastic underneath then you will get water pooling and that water will
penetrate into the solid it's also important to
that solid pit i even when it's covered with saw by regularly inspecting it to insert
to see for example there are no rabbit holes that have dug into it to see that there has been no crackings
so that the soil hasn't opened up and there's a risk that air and pet and water can penetrate
in the other option we've got if we're making chop silage
is rather than actually dig into the ground or dig into the side of the hill we can create a hill all
that happens all we do is mount up some dirt on either side so we drag it in from the surrounding area
and build a wall true wall structure drive through option and then we can
either cover that with plastic and tires for short term storage or plastic and
dirt for longer term storage this is a particularly valuable option in
areas where the topography is pretty flat and there's a risk of water lying around so for example if you talk about areas
out on western new south wales where the ground is quite flat and you're probably looking at making
silence more as a drought storage one option is to dig a hole in the ground and fill it with silage
however when it rains in very flat country as we all know
the water can tend to lay there and it will percolate down into the soil and it will then penetrate into that pit
from the sides so you will get damage to the silage so therefore keep it above
that that potential water infiltration ground seepage is what definitely recommended
if we've got a big enough operation and we're feeding silage regularly
enough then ultimately it may be worth considering going for something like a concrete bunker
you're more likely to see these on street dairy farms where silage is fed
six seven eight or even more months of the year the advantages of this concrete bunkers
are they're a permanent storage site but they require little maintenance
so even if we put silage into a bunker underground into a pit underground or
build up wall sides or make a bunker eventually some of the sides will
collapse or some of the dirt will slump into the area where the silage is
as we're removing it so at reasonably regular intervals you
may be required to get somebody in there and clean that dirt out and look at refreshing your silage pits
now the other big advantage obviously with concrete bunkers is because they're all concrete with a
concrete floor doesn't matter so much if it rains so
you could imagine you know in an operation where feeding silage routinely throughout several months of
the year it's part of your standard practice then having a concrete bunker offers
them some significant benefits in terms of access or weather access
again good best option but probably only going to be suitable
you're used by people who regularly feed silage or particularly regularly feed
silage in area times of the year where wet
high rate levels high rainfall is likely to cause some problem two points to with that is firstly
you still need to have a slope on that concrete floor so that any rainfall any water that does
fall will come back out the second point and we on that is that as we
uh people that move towards concrete bunkers there is an increasing reliance on or
increasing emphasis on oh safety and you may find that if you construct
these make sure you get approval from your local authorities on what you're doing
and you may need to even have some safety rails off the top
so that you don't fall over the edges when you're rolling
so design considerations but we've took that ground water seeping
into the silage the second one is width the width of a silage pit silage bunker
is going to determine um how fast we've go back
or how much of that silage we remove in terms of centimeters back or every
every time we feed so so a silage bunker that's three meters wide
will go backwards twice as fast as a signage bunker that's six meters wide if
you're feeding the same amount out daily and that becomes important because once
we're feeding the silage is exposed to the air and the air
will mean that the silence will start to deteriorate it will start to become unstable which
you'll tell be able to tell because it's heating in webinar four we'll look at some
data about the impact of heating on on animal production but in simple terms
solids that heats tends to support lower intakes and lower growth rates or lower
milk production so in summary make your pit your bunker
or design your your your um storage so that it's relatively
narrow and deep and long rather than a huge white face where it takes you a
long time to get across and remove the material however remember it's got to be at least 1.8
or two tractor widths wide because when you're rolling you're always rolling up and down you've
got no other option and if it isn't wide enough there will be a period
there will be a section in the middle where there won't be any tractor wheels so there won't be any compaction
so therefore you will end up with the or the risk is you'll end up with an area of
top material that's poorly compacted a lot of air more likely to go moldy more likely to
be problems when you feed it out if people choose to go down the chop
silage but they're not looking for long-term storage and
they're not looking for constructing either a silage pit or or above ground
bunker then one option is simply to make a bun buns work very very well
the material is just dropped spread out to ensuring that it's not too wide for
the plastic coverage you choose to use and then it's rolled the difference with a
bun is obviously that you can roll across which as the buns get taller and they
tend to be steeper is a good option from a safety point of view because you can imagine that
as the sides get steep it's not feasible to drive lengthways with attractive
because there's a fairly significant risk of toppling over and that's obviously not
recommended they are suitable for shorter term storage than pits because
you don't cover them in soil they don't have that extra protection
generally i would say they'd be appropriate for a regular feeding program where silage
is fed out every during as part of the normal annual cycle
on the farm but you would be able to probably get away with
a long slightly longer period of storage than that with this because the plastic is
integrity is reasonable what i would suggest though is if you make silage
like this because and remember it does have the advantage you don't need to construct a pit or
anything to do it so you can if you decide to make chopped silage you can you can pretty well do it anywhere if
you do go down that way and you're not sure you're going to feed in the next 12 or 18 months
then if you put a second layer of old plastic over the top is not a bad idea and certainly cover it
pretty well because what you're trying to do is reduce the sunlight because hitting the the key
layer of plastic over that's sealing the plastic the silage because sunlight the uv rays
will actually break down plastic and we know what happens to plastic bags and things outside after a while they just
disintegrate and obviously that will happen to silage plastics as well
and then air gets in there are also some new plastic and
covering options available and i haven't personally used these i have seen them they do sound
very user friendly and people that use them are quite happy with them
they generally involve a thinner layer of plastic over the bunker and then covered with
a heavier sheet which is more like to feel it's more
like a shakeoff now
the reported advantage of that thin layer of plastic underneath is it is
totally impervious to oxygen all plastic will allow some oxygen
transfer and later on we'll see what the implications of that are so if you have a layer of plastic
some oxygen will will there are micro pores and some oxygen will transfer through that
what we have traditionally done with the black and white plastic is we've used two or three layers of
plastic laminated and by doing that work on the base of
those micro pores aren't going to line up and so the amount of air that transfers from one to the other is
negligible and that's pretty much evidenced by the lack of waste that we get in a well seal pit however this other
sheet is just a single sheet and claims the same thing
the other option that goes with that is to use the heavier
shape cloth type sheet and then use bags filled with sand rather than solids that sorry rather
than done tires for waiting waiting is really important waiting
brings the plastic into contact with the silage or the forage at the time and
prevents um prevents any billowing of the plastic
sheet and build up of oxygen oxygen and gases at the top
it also has the advantage that if there is a small hole that develops in the plastic
it it doesn't tend to below as much because it's weighted down
if you can imagine that silage is covered by plastic which which hasn't
isn't adequately weighted down and the wind's blowing that will start to flap so
if that slide hole starts to let air in it will gradually act like a bit of a bellows and it will suck the air in
and continually start to degrade the plastic so therefore putting the tires on works really well
the other thing to remember is that when you make silage ideally you don't get heating
but in practice you will get some heating but more importantly you will get some buildup of gases which will expand up to the surface and
they will tend to create a gap between the solid and the solid plastic unless they're
weighted down properly the risk with that and it's probably most evident in square bar
modules is that tends to be a buildup of moisture probably oxygen which leads
to a an area of um deterioration damage which you wouldn't normally see
in a well-weighted silage silence i can i explain it by saying it allows
for an a pocket of air and moisture concentrated at one spot in the bunker or the bun which
allows for that damage to occur so if we look at what we've got here i would say the one
on the left is not covered with sufficient tyres because it runs the risk
that there won't be enough pressure on it on the plastic however if you look at
the one on the right i would say it's done a pretty good job
which means we're coming to square bowel modules now as i mentioned
before square bars have a number of storage options that round bar lock solid just don't
have one of these is storing them in modules
now modules have one major advantage they allow people
to produce square barrel sizes relatively inexpensively and so they're
able to try square barrel silage and silage in general to see how it fits within their farming
operation however there's a couple of points with making square bales silage
the first one is they're only suitable for short-term storage they've
only got a one layer of plastic generally it's difficult to weight them down at
the top and the sides are not protected at all
it's very difficult to exclude all the air at the time when you're making them
because despite your best effort every barrel will not be exactly the same length
therefore you could imagine that are down the sides there will be a gap between the bail
and the plastic which allows air to penetrate the implication of that is if you get a
hole in the plastic or once the stack is open any air
penetration isn't just at the site where the hole is or at the face after you've
opened it the air will penetrate all the way around that solid stack so the last barrel will be starting to
deteriorate the top from the moment that you open that stack
it also means that you've got to be extremely vigilant to make sure you patch any holes if they
get in the plastic the other risk with them is that because
they don't can't have that weight or that you don't have weight all over them like you do over pits if
you get a hole in them and it is windy they will tend to billow a lot more so they'll tend to suck air in
as the plastic flaps [Music]
a couple of other points
because of that air ingress that air entering as soon as it's open
the recommendation for how big those modules are is declining and it's probably started
out at two weeks it's down to ten days or even less so only store a small amount of of
silage in one of the modules terms of weight you can put plastic tiles on top of the plastic
but one alternative would be to get some strips of plastic lay them over the top
and wipe them down on the edges with either a tire or a drum full of water or something
like that anything you can just to keep some weight both on the top and perhaps a little bit
down the side the other point i would make is that
when you make those stacks rather than start in the middle
for example if you're going three wide one in the middle one on either side of all on either side start in the corner and
work to the work out so that the side where the first bar
was placed becomes relatively flat and any unevenness caused by the
different sizes of the bowels is all restricted to one side so you
you're slightly limiting the amount of air that can penetrate after opening because only happens
to the same to that normal extent on one side
the other option with with above ground modules is and this also occurs within
pits if you want rather than have the gap like we see on on the flight on
the left or the photo on the left between the barrels one option is to build what your first
module run it down run the plastic down and run it out so you can see that white plastic
the white top layer that's coming out then start with another layer of plastic
and build your next module so that it's hard up against that first module what that means is
you've got less area to worry about in terms of maintaining um maintaining weeds or controlling
weeds and less area for vermin to probably get in and cause problems
but ultimately if you're looking for longer term storage bars in a pit work really really well
when i my advice for you if you're going to go down for bales in a pit which you could use for long-term storage or
short-term storage is make sure the pits a little bit wider than the barrels
or the number of bars you plan to put in the put in the pit so for example if you
want to go four bales wide allow about 10 15 centimeters extra
width on either side and rather than stacking into a corner like
the modules stack into the center
that means that when you finish there will be a gap down either side of the
pit but we're going to do two things we're firstly going to cover it with plastic
like top solids so if we start the pit and we lay some plastic part partly
down the side of the back of the pit put our bars in we roll our plastic forward then we can
either get to the end of the mod of the pit and say that's it or we can do it in modules similar to
the diagram we had before and then we put the plastic so it's
hanging down the sides once that's done we fill that back up with dirt
and that compacts down in and prevents air getting in to the bars from the side and you can
see there looking at that picture those bars are pretty good i can't really see any damage
or any discoloration in in the silage that's there a couple other points with storage
storing bars in pits or big square bars in pits again probably go half a bale higher
than the surrounding ground when you first start because they will slump somewhat
and you don't want to end up with a hollow that's going to allow water to pull
obviously just keep an eye on it and if needs be fill it up with um more dirt just top it
up so it's mounted and it sheds water but works extremely well and
is is a a good alternative to the more ext more or the less
reliable i suppose you'd say the less longer it's a long-stand up longer term
storage option compared to the round the the square bars in modules
here's just a diagram of what i mean by the plastic sheet now it doesn't really
matter whether you do this in a pit which is the example given here or in
modules outside you can see it's all going to have a similar design and it will certainly
reduce the amount of gap between them the beauty for in the pit it means that if you're
not if you have a large pit and you're going to feed for a certain period of time but you're unsure whether you're going
to need to feed the whole pet by having dividers going along as you go
backwards you can more easily get to a point and say there is now enough padding fee
or for whatever reason i don't want to feed any longer and you just stop at that point
now a final option is we go down to individually wrap bails
now these are the shortest term storage because the plastic breaks down quickly with uv light
you can do these in round bars or square bars which we'll look at in a minute the rules are the same though ideally
wrap at the storage site to prevent plastic damage during transport if you pick them up and move them they are potentially going
to get a hole in them and a very small hole will lead to some place somewhat mold and waste similarly you need to be
vigilant and probably even more vigilant than the other forms certainly the the top solid storage
systems because you have a very relatively small amount of silage
which can be affected by that small hole an alternative option which will save
plastic because the individual bales are the most expensive in terms of
plastic usage as you can imagine you can wrap those in a
a line so that's reputably going to stop using about 40 plus less plastic
than individual wrap bars and you can do that for round barrels or square bars square bars are usually two bales
high that's a rather designed for smaller round barrels
the ones for square round bars don't always do square bars ones for square bars should do round ones
[Music] that's an inline system and the bars
pretty much get set on the on the machinery they move the machine itself actually moves along
as the vial is wrapped and the bars drop off the back
there are also options for using bags and bags can there are even bags that you can put
shop silage in similar grain or you can put just the bars in so you
can see there's lots of storage options options but that's what we can do
let's have a look at what happens when we make the silage in terms of losses during the storage
we've discussed effluent before we it may be significant but we also
worked out in the last couple that if we ensure dry matter percent is above 30 percent it shouldn't be an issue
there will be some air present at the time you insolve the material and that will
cause respiration and the respiration is going to occur till that airs used up and you can't do much
about it other than pack the pit quickly and as well as you
can and we'll look at that impact later on the other the other thing is aerobic spoilage will happen
once you've got air present and again we'll look at some examples of that there will also be
some fermentation losses they're usually small they're avoidable we did look at them in the last couple
of weeks and we will also look at one option to potentially reduce those so
[Music] respiration losses what happens well
it's the same story as we've had before when you get plant sugars and you've got oxygen they produce carbon dioxide heat
and water and they you lose plant sugars for fermentation you lose may and dry matter and you also get some
heating which if it is really bad you will cause caramelization a reduction in
the protein availability and the ma which we talked about before now in terms of um
how we manage that
it is sorry and we'll go on and arabic spoilage is after the respiration is ceased in a
sense once the silages fermentation is finished or aerobic spilage
you you will occur during the poor exclusion of air it's the biggest management failure in a silage system
because it leads to the decomposition therefore loss of silage dry matter and energy and it also encourages the
growth of anaerobic organisms yeast and moles which then represent
a problem when you're feeding out later because they cause the silage to be less
stable so so how do we avoid that
firstly exclusive again we're at chop silages exclude as much air as possible so a
short chop length correct dry matter content fill the stacks rapidly keep up with rolling and roll slowly and
use a heavy tractor heavy tractor i mean one where the weight
relative weight on the on the tyres in contact with the silage is heavy
you can have some very very big tractors but if they've all got dual wheels and wide tyres then you're probably not
any better off than a smaller tractor with narrow wheels where there's a lot more
weight at the point of contact spread it evenly which we talked about
briefly before ideally no more than 150 ml or six inches thick
you can see now why with you with those big systems where you have self-propelled
forage harvesters and the material is moving very very quickly it becomes very very difficult to
maintain that rolling and their compression to the level that you want so you need to be conscious of that
avoid getting mud into the silage mud itself isn't a good thing because it
reduces the quality of the material where it falls but more importantly mud contains
bacteria it's also a source of undesirable organisms such as the
clostridium so it it can lead to a poorer fermentation so we just avoid that
and the other thing would be if you're making a bigger stack that's fine but cover it overnight so as
the stack gets bigger and bigger and bigger the material underneath is progressively
covered by more silage and so it's reasonably well protected but then at the
at the end of the day if you choose to stop for 10 or 12 hours cover that and just put a little bit of
light weight on that so the plastic doesn't blow up incidentally on that if you're making a pit it is worth filling it
in what we call a wedge so as you could either
have the silage being filled over the whole length which you would for example with a bun but you may choose just
to add the material so that you're progressively moving out further and further along the
pit by filling it up so to the top of the pit
in a website form coming out in which case once you fill that
component up if you cover that bit overnight there's no real need to uncover it again you may at the end
choose to do one final roll over the whole lot but that's probably not essential so in
that case i would leave that component covered up
so one of the things that we wanted to do is keep the air out and
what you can see here are two bunk silage buns ones one's on out the paddock and one's
on on paving or concrete that itself isn't so much the issue
but what you can see is we want to keep the air out to reduce
the losses the pitcher on the left is well covered in tires the plastic is
buried into the ground and because it's a single sheet it's very very little chance of air getting
in there unless there's a hole the picture on the right however you've got loose plastic you've got very
few tyres and all you've got is plastic laying on concrete or pavers with some forage
weighting it down air will penetrate in that
furthermore when air wind blows across that that plastic will flap and it will act like a bellows and it will
will suck the material in so if you've gone to all the hassle of making it please seal it properly otherwise you're
in trouble now we have a
question here or we have a series of questions one what time what do i refer to as short medium and
long term story short term is being fed out within the next 12 maybe 18 months in
in my opinion medium time storage would mean that it will probably be
suitable for two to three maybe four years depending on how well the plastic lasts
and longer term storage is essentially indefinite it could be 60 70 years
it's how long will individual barrels last while retaining reasonable feed value and water is the best way to repair
holes the second plate will do shortly they will retain feed value while ever
the airtight seal is maintained the problem with those individual bars is maintaining that seal
is is short-term um how big are the losses for those who chop silage into a
pit but the pit is that big it takes three days to fill and get seal sealed again back to what i just said
if you put your silage down inside your photo in such a way that you're building
on top all the time then the material that's down the bottom is pretty well protected and it
shouldn't cause any real losses or any major additional losses and it's the standard we have to do and
we've done for years alternatively if you do the pit do the wedge thing and make sure the plastic's
over the difference in fee value between chopped silage and bowel solids
comes back in my opinion comes back primarily to whether or not you may have additional
losses from the bile system because you've produced the material when it's drier other than that
if you conceptually could have two silages that were the same
the quality losses should be very very similar however in terms of what you would
really notice what we do know though is with
chopped solids the fermentation pat proceeds much more quickly
than with the bile silage and that's based on very little little data at where
chopped solids and bowel silage at the same dry matter content have been compared in bales and what
you'll see is the purge drops much more slowly in the bath silage
now whether that's going to lead to significantly greater losses
is doubtful but we really don't know we really have no idea whether or not
that's going to be a major effect or not and when you take
into account the fact that bile silages are generally made at about 50 percent when the dry matter
content pretty much restricts the fermentation there is very little fermentation
that's why i come back and say that the chopped silage and bath solids difference is primarily
going to be dry matter which made it i will put in the proviso and i can't answer this and i don't know
of anyone that can and that is whether or not if you were to produce two silages
at the same dry matter content one chopped one nut chop whether or not there would be more
protein degradation in the bile silage and the reason why that may be so
is that one of the things that stops protein degradation with occurring
is a more rapid drop in ph partly it's because as is used up
and there's very little or no respiration and that occurs because of the plant enzymes not because
of the bacteria the other way is because ph falls below five
once it's below five you don't get very much protein degradation
but we do know that a lot of chopped solids sorry a lot of other silages are made well with badges well over five
and the protein fraction still seems to be reasonable which would say to me
that the air is used up pretty quickly and the main thing stopping any degradation is probably
the fact that there is no fermentation happening there is no respiration happening so simple answer is probably just stick to
the at this stage in the lab of any other data it's probably just the dry matter effect
but what i've got here is i'm actually looking at a picture this is obviously a real
signage bit which has come and it probably came from
a pit that didn't look that different to the one in this slide above
which wasn't well sealed what you'll get is you'll get these layers decomposing
multi-layer at the top you'll see that on veil solid just two big squares in modules and again i put it down to that
condensation and a little pocket of air forming at the top you'll get a black layer which is
obviously being degraded and often slimy but the other thing you'll get is this colored heating layer
underneath now we do know and we'll look at some figures next week but we do know
that that material has undergone some deterioration in terms of energy
so so even though um you might look and say well there's a little bit of waste at the top and it's
not really such a big deal we do know that it it's a big deal because it has little impacts
all the way down the other one i missed their best aim to
fill it pit one pit in a day uh if you're up and going and that suits your system and it's going to give you
something that probably matches well with your feeding system
it's a good way to go if you're doing bars in a pit certainly i would look to the modules
internal modules so you'll get that done but if you're doing top solids
probably not a bad way to do it but not an essential
the other thing i want to look at is solids density affects dry matter losses which again we'll probably skip through this
pretty quickly but again this is chopped silage and we know that if you get denser
silence pack better and we you'll get less air penetration
so therefore you get lower spoilage you get more material in your pit or your bunker
and you'll end up with a silage that's probably got
it should have less moles less yeast and when you open it up it'll be more stable and just to give you an idea of what you
can get this is this is um some silages from the us where they looked at making
some i think it's 47 different silages and they measured the density
of loosened there was a loosen and losses after 180 days of insaling
in bags and you can see there this is bag so it's it's probably protecting it a
little bit in terms of a good system to stop air getting in
as density in kilograms of dry matter per cubic meter increases
losses decline so they're effectively losses related to the air that's trapped at the
time of infiling now ideally silages should be around that
225 to 250 kilos of dry matter a well-made silage is going to be there
the ones that that's 350 um that's fire really fine chopped and very
very well compacted but you can see if you can achieve it you will increase
reduce your losses the other thing is we this is
also data which shows the effect of um dry matter content or the range in dry
matter content density and chop length that you can get and this is from 168 bunker silos
in the us now you've got some which are hay crop like what they call hay crop is mainly
loosen but it could be timothy and a few other types of pastors uh or may solid and you can see there that
there's they're very similar between the two in terms of dry matter density and
for the hay crop and the um my solid 237 versus 232
and the chopped lengths are very very similar but there is a huge range that
density ranging from 106 to 434
in the hay crop or 125 to 378. so what's out there is a huge range
and that range we just saw doesn't impact on losses
two points to get out of this one is the effect of sugar content water soluble carbohydrate content on
the speed at which fermentation occurs and also the impact of delayed sealing
so what you can see there is experiment 1 27 sugar content experiment 2 less sugar
content only 11 percent so the ph
um with for the 27 at the surface
and deeper down was lower it's only slightly lower but it was lower
than for the experiment two which translated into lower losses in experiment one of
experiment two probably the biggest thing to take out of this because ultimately
the sugar content is either going to be dictated by the seasonal conditions or the crop or pasta we're harvesting the biggest
thing to take out is if you delay sealing and unlike what we were talking about
before where you're continually filling so you're covering up material all the time
this is effectively making the silage and then taking the weekend off and coming back
on monday and putting the plastic over it you'll see that it had a big impact on on ph
particularly at this in experiment 2 where you had less sugar but more
importantly it'll increase your losses so
fine if you're continually filling over three days but once you fill seal very very quickly the same thing is
true for bales really losses start to occur from the moment it's
bailed because it's going to start to warm up everyone knows that once you file some material
it doesn't really matter what it is you will get heating to occur fairly quickly so wrap as quickly as you can wrap at the
storage site like i said before so you don't run the risk of puncturing it 12 months storage
sufficient layers of plastic and make sure the lumbar the plastic is applied evenly
and we'll look at a couple of things about that firstly remember i mentioned before the
plastic's not impervious and you do get some oxygen passing through or with wrap bile
silages it's a relatively thin layer of plastic which is stretched and the level of the quantity of stretch
will depend on manufacturer recommendation but it will be stretched and you will
get ideally for some people even say six layers of film but there is some impact
of air penetrating that side that plastic where the layers are
filming on and on so if we look at that this is an irish study where they looked at the impact of
two layers versus four layers looked at the average amount of mold and
rotted area and digestibility and you can see that there's a clear
difference in favor of putting four rows on in terms of average mold depth
average amount of materials rotted and digestibility now i wouldn't personally be overly
happy with even what they've gotten for but you what you can see it too is there's quite a significant loss
there which means that over time there's a lot of this oxygen
moving backwards and forwards in so we look at a couple of problems
where we've got unable plastics wrapping so if you've got a wrap bar you want
four layers but you want four layers over every single part of that bail because
you can see quite clearly the different color striations in the base where it's four
layers and two layers and this is what you get you get mold penetra because air is penetrated
through the two layers the other problem is if you do a really crap job and the vials are very very
soft you'll get this slumping means you'll have air there
it means there'll probably be mold as well but when the valve slumps if it
collapses and particularly if you've got it laying on on the round end there's a risk that that
will stretch or break that plastic and let air in another good reason why you would store
on the on the flat end same thing can kind of can occur if it's too wet
also the same problem if you've got wrapping bars in a tube line wrapper but they're all uneven sizes you can
imagine that where the valves are all very similar the plastic
is all stretched at the same amount but where you've got differences where
you've got big bars there might be more stretching but particularly where you've got a big ball
and a smaller bar that area between the sort of the side area between the
big bar and the little bell you will have uneven plastic stretching and you'll probably have you will have more stretch plastic so
you will get more air in so try and maintain bars barrel integrity in terms of
shape evenness of size is important sometimes people will under stretch
their plastic and it doesn't grip properly it doesn't stick well and there's a more chance of it
falling to pieces and they're getting in sometimes you will see
barrels where forage has been allowed to stick out everywhere and it becomes like trapped between the
layers of plastic and sometimes even sticking out past the plastic
so that's not in the in the bowl itself that's going to let air in this is a much less common problem now
that we use net wrap because it does a pretty good job but there is still some incidences of it
the other advantage of netwrap compared to the l string system too is that where you you don't have that
area where the string is where it's the ball is constricted which allows for
air to circulate around there which particularly if you get a small hole is a real problem
grub holes um it does happen it's probably from gippsland where it's
it's not uncommon two things still on the flat end because they've got thicker plastic
so on the flat end anyway because it's thicker more uv resistance because you've got
more layers of plastic birds are an issue foxes are an issue
rabbits are an issue anything that can damage the plastic even a tiny pinhole and it
might be surprising but if you look at those tiniest holes you can see there in six
months time that maybe represent a handful of more of mold because
the air will get in and slowly start to work its way through the bail as the mild area
increases the amount of material that's decayed and rotten will be will be greater and there'll be more
in there and it'll just feed on itself
pretty obvious but it does happen particularly if cows like your your silage and they'll still smell it
through the plastic what i mean by uv degradation
it's a lot of money to make fails and wrap them so ensure that they can be used within
the 12 months there are options like covering them with a second layer of plastic if need
be to reduce that uv degradation i have heard of people trying to start
talking about storing them in sheds and things like that consider all the pros and cons of whatever you want to do but
whatever happens the goal is you really need to
be aware that uv degradation will be significant and it'll tend to happen across all the
valves pretty much at once so all of a sudden you'll end up with a lot of bars that need to be
handled pretty quickly i think we've had a stuff up there with
another one um now a couple of things about plastic
and sealing them there was a question before the rule is pretty simple firstly
buy proper plastic that for patching silage you can go and you can buy rolls
of silage patching tape which um
are designed specifically for silence we used to use duct tape because we have
very little options but we it was a relatively short term option before it fell off like in that picture
there the when we've applied the tape we buy a
tape that's the same color as the plastic that we're patching so white
buns we use white tape pink ones we use pink tape and the reason for that is when these
patches are sitting out in the sun so they're going to get hotter during the day and then cooler during
the night you can imagine that if you have a black patch on a white background
the black will absorb more heat and will try and expand more than the white plastic and at night they
will they will it will shrink again so you end up with this movement which eventually leads to
the patch becoming loose and maybe developing a little air hole in it between
the contact points and so therefore it's a good idea to to use the same poly plastic the
other thing is before you put like put the plastic on just make sure the air is clean and dry
so you don't want any dust and dirt that's going to be any limitation to the sticking occurring
so wipe it down let it get dry then
determine how much tape you need so if you need a length of tape of 20 centimeters cut your 20 centimeters
but when you put it on don't stretch it
lay the plastic down and smooth it over
the the whole area a similar to the heating if the plastic is
stretched it's going to be trying to compact contract differently to the plastic so as it heats and cools
you're going to have the same issues
the the question of getting one of the animal welfare issues of moldy silage example
listeria look there are issues with moldy silage just um there are issues with moldy hay
what i would say is it's very difficult to to know just by looking whether
something's dangerous or or damaging or not solid or for hay the color of the mold
does not have any impact it you can get poisonous moles of any color and safe molds or
relatively safe molds of any color my understanding of the topic is a bit
restricted but the molds moles produce compounds called mycotoxins
and depending on who and what you read you'll get estimates of there's been between two and three hundred thousand microtoxins produced by
moles in the world means it's very difficult to test for them
there are some testing you can get done at wherever to look at mulch but ultimately it's
very um much hit and miss because you may have a different poison
or toxin there than the one they test for it's probably going to cost you 900 to get a test and even the same mold
and again this is my understanding the same old may or may not
cause problems it just depends whether or not they produce that mycotoxin
or maybe that microtoxin is in big enough quantity what i would say though is the issue um
with with molds and mycotoxins is well get some data next week but firstly
the reduction in animal production by from microtoxins which is obviously difficult to see in
many cases but more importantly it could be a case of if it's
horrible moldy silage it's probably got very little or no feed value in it so you've made something that's it's
useless for your animal the advice again we'll go into more detail next week but the advice is
don't force stop to eat mold and definitely don't feed moldy silage to
hungry stock specific one that martin manson says listeria listeria
causes abortions uh if if um you were concerned
like you had very degrade maori silages and things like that i would certainly be
[Music] reticent to feed that to pregnant stock particularly
pregnant use because sheep are more susceptible and to me it's probably not worth the risk
feed it later when there's not not risk of losing pregnancy and also when
you can feed it so that's only part of their diet they're not forced to eat it but again difficult to say listeria
is one of those [Music] microorganisms that is ubiquitous in the
environment it's around it becomes a problem when numbers build up and and
under certain conditions it became really problematic when people started using
big square big sorry big round bale silages in bags where there wasn't the good plastic seal
up against the the silage the the other one which is where we're
up to anyway is plastic recycling um what do we do now
this comes up quite regularly and it seems that various organizations do have a go at trying to
to do something about it my advice is check with your local council or
landcare group for example i know holbrook landcare group does or did have um a program in place at
looking at recycling plastic the only
operation that i'm currently aware of is a a group called plastic forests plastic
florence i think in albury they they handle recycled plastic uh silage basics but i think
them used to be it may still be one on the mid in the central coast the mid north coast or somewhere
but check with your council check with your landcare group to see what options exist in your area
the other thing is whatever the whatever the organization is that may be recycling
they have real difficulty with dirty plastics so try and keep dirt and silage
contamination to a minimum ideally if you can wash it otherwise they have to wash it
definitely no rocks or other particles steel or whatever in there pet string and net
wraps are because they're recycled differently and if you can compress it into a wool pack or a bulker
bag or something one idea i did see that i thought was pretty good which was for
round bale silage was that when the plastic came off one barrel it was folded up and put on put on the
ground and the next day's bail was put on top of that that compacted it and so eventually he's just built up a
whole stack of compressed plastic but that that's about all we can do at the moment um
is contact someone local oh s i mentioned um the rails
that's that's a bunker or solid concrete bunker with rails around it because
remember you are right up high and if those pits are two or three meters tall
it's a long way to fall off the edge certainly no children look up and live power lines are a real
issue stop machines when working on so all the
standard rules that we need to follow use ample light at night take regular breaks and be aware of machinery
and make sure that the people that are working with you know what they're doing they're well trained and supervised
it's not enough anymore just to get someone off the street
the additives again in our last 10 minutes we'll we'll just
talk about one of those and that's the inoculant but what you should be aware of is there
have been a lot of different types of additives used in australia but more traditionally in europe and
other countries other areas and a bit more detailed
explanation then i was all in the manual that's the categories they're broken
down into but in australia at the moment
there's probably only inoculants which are actively being marketed and
used within our solid systems and what they do and often get asked
should we use them what an inoculant does it loads up
the silage with the right bacteria so it improves the nutritive value
of well-preserved silages i think you remember last week i said it won't take a really poorly wilted
silage and make it better it might
make a solid just tip over the balance so it is a little bit better that it won't take
something that's poor and converted into something that's good some of them will improve aerobic
stability of silage which is important that feed out some mad nutrients
some reduce losses and and ideally um some of them
will reduce the risk of a poor fermentation they were more traditionally the
things like acids which were used to to lower artificially lower ph when it was
unlikely the bacteria could compete which was generally in very wet silages but as i said it's
not it's not a good substitute for poor from oh it's no substitute for good management
so what do they do so if you look at the inoculants this is what they basically do they put lactic acid bacteria
in sufficient quantity now it used to be at least one times ten to the 5 colony forming units per gram of fresh
forage into the solids so that those bacteria dominate the fermentation
1 times 10 to the 5 is now sometimes 1 times ten to the sixth so you can imagine that ten to the sixth
is a lot of little bugs and a gram of fresh forage is not very much so there's a lot of them
they are less likely to be effective on low sugar forages because there's not the product
there's not the solids substrate the sugar there it will work on
and they are reported to reduce fermentation losses by maybe two or
three percent so that losses occur when the sugars are fermented and
acid is produced there will be some loss of dry matter due to
production of other acids and other compounds but by driving the fermentation so that's particularly
lactic acid produced you'll get less of those losses but the important thing
is what they do from an animal production or a point perspective eventually so they
improve the fermentation which happens more efficiently because more sugars
converted to acid ph drops more quickly less fermentation in terms of sugar
breakdown or sugar conversion to acid so there's more sugar they tend to support higher
intakes they tend to increase digestibility and because the breakdown happens more quickly the
fermentation happens more quickly the ph drops more quickly the protein
perfection is better preserved so they there is less degradation so they utilize it pro
in protein more effectively so when's it going to work well i i would say
if you have a silage which has a very high energy content so the classic might be a may solid or
you know of a very high quality high sugar high-end protein rye grass and that
represents a significant proportion of the diet
and you feed it to a responsive animal so i would say if you've got
a feedlot steer being fed a diet that contains a lot of maize silage
which is high in energy then definitely the inoculants will increase return there will be a
definite production advantage but because it's got to be an economic advantage
we need to make sure that the cost of doing that is is less than the additional benefit of
the livestock production so my example is if i put a solid inoculant
on a bowl of pasture which is medium to high quality but all i'm going
to do is feed that to some dry cows over our ore or some dry heifers or even some
cows over with or when they need a little bit of supplementation and i'm looking at maintenance if they
end up five or ten kilos heavier at the end of winter compared to those that were fed the other bars
there's really no way of catching that economic benefit so it's i don't see that there's
probably a real benefit for it other than that single example where for
example where you might have a silage which you have to make at 30
or 32 dry matter content you're concerned because of the it's low sugar potentially high buffing
firstly of getting a good fermentation it might it will it might improve the
fermentation enough so that you'll get a benefit there but they're they're the grounds when i
consider uh documents of value and i'll just show you quickly some data here this was this was actually
faded wagga um there was a maze silage era it was either left as is
um used a broad spectrum so this going back a while so just a traditional broad
spectrum inoculant or a my specific inoculant and this these are pioneer inoculants and and i
had selected certain um inoculants based on various reasons and so the
mate specific one was designed or selected because of it but its effect on mazes
you'll see there a couple of things obviously the dry matter contrary is similar phs the ones with the inoculant are a
little bit lower but they're all very very low so it's all very well preserved
ammonia nitrogen as a percent of nitrogen now there is definitely
less ammonia and the may specific than the untreated so that would indicate that the faster
fermentation has reduced the degradation of the protein but i always look at
ammonia nitrogen from maize with a little bit of caution
last week we talked or the week before we talked about less than five percent of money excellent five to ten percent good
that's based on forages that have got a reasonable protein content
probably you know that 10 to 15 percent product just for example
maize and this maze i can't remember specifically but often has protein content sort of
six seven percent so if there's always going to be some ammonia produced
it can re it can represent a bigger proportion so i don't worry so much about it but the interesting thing there is if
you look at live weight gain yeah it wasn't significant but but there
wasn't a a slight improvement in live weight gain but what was significantly different
um is the amount of kilograms of gain per ton of silage
i think if you pull the two inoculants together you may it may have been significant live weight gain so it does
work it does improve live weight gain and it does improve efficiency
but then just do your sums and say well is the cost of inoculating worth
the extra benefit and in this situation that i mentioned before high quality silage responsive animal um
and significant likely to be a significant proportion of the diet i would i would certainly always use an inoculant
the other inoculant that we use now is lactobacillus we will spend some time
on this next week but we talked about if you heat get heating
that's aerobic spoilage and you will get some reduction in both intake and also production by animals
consuming that damaged silage so that gets back to the mold bit that was asked about before
and more responsive it's usually just the microtoxins causing the problem so if we look at that one there you've
got a maya silage maze is notoriously unstable it can start to heat within just a few hours of
exposure to air in all aspects
they are very very similar except for aerobic stability you see that the untreated one became
unstable in less than a day whereas the one with the lactobacillus inoculant
which is just another strain of lactobacillus that we use similar to all the other lactic acid
bacteria it becomes a much more stable but that translated into
marginally greater intake but significantly greater blight weight gain and that's easy to
explain because going from 903 to 935 grams per day
32 grams all that additional 32 grams went into live weight gain because
all maintenance and every other
all those um other requirements for those animals for heat and walking and all the rest they've already been met
so that's why you get it now i know we've got a minute to go but if i'm allowed to see i've just got
a couple of quick questions i might just go on to uh scott howe fishing is great for soaking
up moisture for silages or not will drown dry down before cut
example of late season maize i've never seen it in maize i have seen it in pasture
i've actually seen it in pasture where people routinely layer cereal grain with
pasta silages and produce the pasta silages a little bit wet so the moisture's
soaked up yes it will work and the argument is that soaking the grain will increase the rate of which the
animals can break that down by chewing and all the rest of it so you'll get greater utilization
not not widespread in use but i have seen it in australia and
certainly grain is one of those absorbents that have been used before
and yes i'd also agree that for responsive animals and in most situations it's probably
cheap insurance um i think i think that uh i've got a
i've got about a couple of other questions that have been threatened through and i think the only one i haven't really mentioned here was specific
challenges with tropical silage or tropical species and that i would limit purely to the fact that they
are what we said before they're very low in sugar so they have all the issues that low
sugar plants have in that you don't get much fermentation you're relying on
quite a rapid building and storing that in the absence of air so that you get us preservation so the
materials preserved but you just wear the fact that you're probably going to have a higher ph
than you would normally expect for that dry matter content but believe me i've seen some really really good
tropical species silages they're certainly lean a lot of tropical kaikea which is a tropical grass mainly
on the coast that produces glutathione and i probably should leave it at that
too thanks for that john um yeah so thank
you for your time today as i mentioned earlier this is the third of four webinars aimed at developing
your understanding of silage production and use so we really strongly encourage you to
register for our final webinar which will be same time next week and this will be on
feeding out and feed testing thank you all for your time
today
