It was 6:10 a.m.
I lived an hours and half away from the field so at 4:30 I was headed out the door. My dog seemed more upset that he had been forced to do his walk a full 2 hours early than he cared about me leaving.
Meeting the farmer, we discussed the day. He drives, I follow, I record the truck numbers, I follow the truck to the silage pit, I collect samples, we repeat the cycle.
Chopping corn for silage seems like a craft of the ages. A strange production vehicle with a spout out-stretched to fill large trucks with toppers to keep their contents from spilling on to cars as they go down the highway.
Forage Harvesters, behemoth machines, run back and forth with their trucks following along like Duck and Ducklings on a summer night. Never far away, awaiting their turn are the trucks aligned in a row.
Forage Harvesters are also used in production of "Triticale". Triticale is a hybrid of wheat and rye that was bred in Scotland in the 19th Century.
Both are chopped in finite pieces, pulverized, and placed in silage pits for use in animal feeding operations. Silage is compacts, made air tight, and then fermented. A process that has been utilized since the 19th Century and is the same process that you use to make sauerkraut.
I was here collecting samples of the different harvesters to compare the quality of the chopping. Were they consistently sized? Was the corn cracked? (Honest to God, Jimmy cracked corn and I cared and measured it). Thanks, Jimmy! My goal was develop an idea if the equipment was sufficiently (and statistically similar.
I sent most of the samples back fresh to a lab on the other side of the United States. I kept some, sealing them, and making my tiny mini silo to test them in 90 days. Peak of freshness right there!
The sad part? By day 5 my samples exploded so I had to reseal them again, on a Saturday, sniffing each sample to make sure they hadn't gone bad.
All in the name of science . This my office today, sniff, stuff, seal, stack.
THE WHY:
We forage harvest to allow winter feeding of livestock. They cannot eat off grass year around if they wanted to. It damages the grass, the feed quality of the grass is very low in the winter, and frankly it is bad for the environment for them to eat on the grassy lands in the winter.
Fermenting is actually better for the ruminant animals (You take a pro-biotic, so do these gals.) It makes it easier to eat.
We choose the corn stalks and triticale because it has fiber and good nutrients (eat your veggies cows). The forage harvester makes it easier to store, and makes it better for the animals to eat.
