Harvest is finished, but there ain't no slowing down!

We can finally close the book on this year's silage harvest! What started six and a half weeks ago ended Thursday with 165 acres of corn, forage sorghum, and sudex chopped, packed, and sealed into our three silage pits.  I'm estimating that we harvested roughly 1400 tons of silage (it's hard to be sure w/o truck scales), which should be enough to feed our milking herd through mid-to-late spring. 

dumping a load of chopped sudex

The corn in our first pit has now been sealed long enough to fully ensile, and I expect we'll begin feeding it late next week. We'll be getting a new grain mix formula from the feed mill based on the silage's forage analysis, and will add other home-grown forage in with it to make a total-mixed ration (TMR). We have about two weeks worth of spring oat baleage we'll use up first before switching to sudex baleage we harvested a few weeks ago.  We're also going to look into using cotton hulls as a fiber source in the ration so as to preserve our bermudagrass hay for heifers and dry cows.

As the feed quality improves over the next few weeks, so to should our milk production. The cooler evenings and opportunities for supplemental morning grazing will also help in that regard. We are currently up to 182 cows in milk and are on pace to climb back over the 200 mark sometime before the end of the year. In other news, we AI'ed (artificially inseminated) 9 cows this week, the first we had bred since early summer.

This coming week is going to be crazy busy. In addition to the everyday dairy chores, we're going to be cleaning and putting away our harvesting equipment, applying slurry with our honeywagon, and possibly harvesting some rank pasture grass as "get-by-in-case-of-a-long-winter" hay.  On top of that, some folks from our dairy checkoff will be on the farm Tuesday morning to get video footage for part of the "Dedicated to Dairy" campaign, I have a meeting at the Alabama Farmers Federation's Montgomery office on Wednesday, and then I'll be on Mississippi State's campus on Maroon Friday to give a presentation to the Ag Econ's faculty and grad students (Hail State!).

I hope y'all have a "dairy" good week!

Silage Harvest: the end is near

Silage chopping has run pretty smoothly this week, and I'm happy to report that we now have one silage pit full of sorghum. We'll take some time this morning to cover and seal the pit with plastic so the chopped sorghum will ferment properly. It will be several months before our cows eat any of this feed (we'll use up the corn silage first), but we expect it will preserve nicely.

We still have approximately 20 acres of sorghum remaining, which we'll chop next week and pack into our smallest silage pit. Once we're finished, harvesting 25 acres of sudex (sorghum-sudangrass) will be next on the to-do list. We might chop it and pack it into the pit as well, but we'll most likely make baleage out of it by cutting, baling, and wrapping.

For your viewing pleasure, I've included our latest MooTube Minute which focuses on our silage harvest. I hope you enjoy and, as always, have a "dairy" good day!

Caught up, milk's up, and back to harvesting

We took a break from harvesting silage last week to catch up on some other jobs around the dairy farm. Although Monday was pretty much a washout thanks to Tropical Storm Lee and its nearly 7" of rain (much needed, by the way), we did fit in a lot of work Tuesday through Friday. We spent some time moving several animals around into other pastures, fertilized a couple of fields with slurry, and performed maintenance on our harvesting equipment.

GDF #636 "Adele" shades on a sunny September day

The best thing about the past week is the upswing in our cows' milk production. On average, the cows are producing five pound of milk more than they were at the beginning of last week. Cooler nights, not-quite-as-hot days, and a change in their feed formulation are the primary reasons the cows are doing better. We are also benefiting from having more "fresh" cows in the milking herd. A fresh cow is one that has recently calved and is increasing its milk production.

We resumed our harvest yesterday with 90 acres of forage sorghum ready to be chopped. If all goes well (and it rarely does with our chopper), I would hope we could harvest 10 acres per day. I managed 5 acres Monday afternoon, so we shall see. Unlike our corn which was planted mostly in straight rows on flat land, all of our sorghum was planted in contoured, terraced fields. This means that we'll have to run a little slower and will have more in-field turning. These fields are closer to our silage pits, though, so there should be minimal downtime waiting on the dump truck to travel back and forth.

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