Thousand pound bags of silage

Thousand pound bags of silage

Cornwall, Vermont, dairyman trying a method that is popular in England.

By Charlie Calley
November 1982

IT’S like having a little individual silo for each bale,” says John Roberts about his technique for making grass silage.

The use of black plastic bags to seal moisture into round, big bale hay has become a common practice in old England, where Roberts is from, but is new to New England.

Roberts first heard of the idea back in 1978, about a year after he and his wife, Lisa, started farming their 260-acre place in Cornwall, Vermont. An avid reader of anything to do with farming, John read in one of the three English agricultural magazines he subscribes to about someone who made an interesting discovery.

”I read an article in Farmer’s Weekly about a guy in England in ’78 who did it,” said John. “There has been a lot of research going on in Europe about storing round bales in bunkers. This worked well until they opened the bunkers. Then they had problems with secondary fermentation. The guy in England came up with the idea of putting each bale in an individual plastic bag.

“He found a plastics manufacturer with bags the right size and tried the idea. It worked and has spread like wildfire through England”

For the past four years, John and Lisa have been studying the progress of this new silage making technique and gathering the tools they would need to make round, big bale hay for their herd of grade Holsteins and registered Brown Swiss cows. This year they tried it out for the first time.

The haying crew consisted of John, Lisa, hired man Yves Chicione, and, for pulling power, a 92 h.p. Same tractor. To cut down the hay, they used a New Holland disc mower. Then comes a combination rake and tedder manufactured by a Dutch company, called PZ. This makes a four-foot wide swath just right for the Roberts’ new Gehl round baler. “Not every baler will bale silage,” said John. “You have to have one that puts out a good, tight bale. We bought a Gehl baler because that was one of the kinds that had been used successfully in England and there is a local dealer nearby.”

A Simple Process
“I just love making round bales,” John said. “It’s such a simple process. We can bale at 10 miles per hour in a smooth field. We made 70 bales on our best day and between 50 and 60 was common.”

“Our usual procedure was to mow in the evening and bale the next morning,” said John. “The bale should have between 65 percent and 45 percent moisture when bagged. We aimed for 60 percent and got it. We’d leave the hay on the ground for between 12 and 16 hours.

“You have to bag within 12 hours of baling,” he said. “We brought them to the barn first. The way to move them is with a bale spike-attached to the bucket on a loader. When the bale is in the air, you slip the bag over, set the bale down, and tie the end.”

“We used regular baler twine to tie the ends,” said Lisa. ”You can use a vacuum cleaner to vacuum out the air, but you don’t need to do that. We double over the end of the bag before tying it because a tight seal is important.”

“The bagging process is a three-man operation,” John said, “but it can be done adequately with two.”

After the grass had fermented to silage, the Roberts tested it for protein and fed it to the cows, in the cement feed trough in the free stall barn. “To feed, you untie the bag and roll back the neck enough to allow the bale spike in, without breaking the plastic. Then, you lift the bale, slip the bag off and put the bag away in a safe place for use next year. You take the opened bale to the barn with the loader and put it in the feed bin. Then, you unstring it and unroll it down the bin. One person can do the unrolling.”

“The cows took to it like ducks to water,” said John. “The round bale silage from our first cutting of a combination of alfalfa and orchard grass averaged 13 percent protein and the pure alfalfa averaged 19 percent.”

John and Lisa have fed out all 350 bales from their first cutting and have set aside 100 bales they bagged from their second and third mowings for Winter feeding. “We’ll feed these in conjunction with corn silage after we open the bunker silo. I want to test the effect of the cold temperatures of New England Winters on the round bale silage. I don’t know if there will be any freeze problems. In England, they have warmer Winters.”

The Roberts have also made some green chop silage for the bunker and put up 330 round bales as dry hay for the Winter. In future years, they hope to put their whole grass crop into round bale silage.

Locating a supply of plastic bags big and strong enough to hold four-foot~wide round bales weighing 1000 pounds each wasn’t easy. “l went to a plastics company to see about having some bags especially made,” said John, “but they said I had to have a minimum order of 30,000 bags.

“Finally, I wrote to a company in England (Polycon) that was already producing these bags and had a proven product. I was able to import them for $2.40 a bag. They can be re-used a second year if you are careful.”

The bags they used this year were a four-mill thick plastic, but next year John says he wants to switch to a thicker, and more expensive, six-mil size. “Next year, we’ve got to make our first cutting earlier when the grass is less mature. This year, some of the orchard grass stalks mixed with the alfalfa made some pinholes in some of the bags. Those bags had a thin surface mold, but we have found it isn’t harmful.”

Higher Quality
John thinks round bale silage is of higher quality than his chopped silage and is more economical to produce. “I’m not happy with the bunker silo because of the manpower and equipment needed to fill it as fast as it should be filled.”

He said the bunker, a 40′ x 100′ concrete type, is “too wide” to feed a herd of 47 milkers, and keep ahead of secondary fermentation. That’s been a problem with grass, but com is OK in the bunker.”

John said he could have divided the bunker in half, or built a tall silo, “but that would have meant more cost and more equipment.

“We liked several advantages of the round bale silage technique,” he said. “It lets you make silage as you want to–a little bit at a time if the weather is bad. You can bale it and preserve it perfectly. You can’t do that with the other methods. It lets you know how much feed you have on hand. Each bale is 1000 pounds.

“Besides, we already had the round baler and the only investment was for the plastic bags.”

“One thing that is very important with round bale silage is to have a good rat and mice control program,” said John. “The bags can be punctured.”

Milk 47
In September of 1977, John and Lisa bought a herd of 30 grade Holsteins to go with their eight Brown Swiss cows and began making milk at their farm. Now, they milk 47 and have five dry cows, seven bred heifers and 45 calves and young stock. John said their most recent milk test shows a 3.4 butterfat percentage on a rolling herd average of 15,800 pounds.

“This place was pretty run down when we moved in,” said John. “It had been empty for a long time. The fencing was atrocious. The buildings weren’t in good shape.” The farm buildings include a 60 foot by 170 foot metal free stall barn, a 35 foot by 35 foot hay barn and an old stanchion barn in rough shape.

“We bought this farm for the quality of the soil, not the buildings,” said John, “although I do like a free stall barn. That’s about all you’ll find in England.”

The Roberts turn their cows out to pasture for part of each day as long as grass is growing. “There is something to be said for letting the cows use their legs a bit,” said John. In Fall, because of dark mornings, the Roberts keep their cows in at night and turn out days.

“I’m convinced that farming profitability comes from the soil,” said John. “If you can grow a good crop, you’ve got a good start of producing good milk.”

During the first four years they have owned their farm, John and Lisa have concentrated on building the fertility of their 150 acres of tillable fields. “They have plowed and reseeded more than 75 acres and begun a program of crop and pasture rotation.

John believes soil compaction is one of the biggest problems for the fertility of his fields and imported a newly developed sub-soil plow from England to deal with the problem.

“In England, farmers are much more aware of compaction as a problem,” John said, “and a lot of new equipment has been designed to deal with it. Sub-soil plows are a big help. They loosen the sub-soil but don’t bring it to the top.

“Soil structure is so vital. In England, they are going to wide tires on heavy farm equipment to spread the weight out better–tires four and five feet wide. Farmers over there are spending up to $16,000 for a set of these tires just to reduce compaction.”

An area of dairying where John and Lisa have enjoyed success is in calf raising. “We’ve only lost four calves ever,” said Lisa, “and one of those drowned and another got hit by a round bale when we put it in the feed bin.”

“When a cow is going to calve, we try to be there,” said John, “because we believe strongly in colostrum–that a calf has got to have it as soon as possible. We encourage the calf to suck as soon as possible. We even have a special tube that lets us pour milk right into a calf’s stomach if it doesn’t want to suck.”

“Colostrum has helped save some of our calves, 1 think,” he said. ‘1t gives them a natural immunity to many diseases.”

“We feed our calves whole milk. We don’t use milk replacer. We try to get the calves off to the best start possible,” said John. “We’ve never had a case of scours and never a case of pneumonia. We’ve never used penicillin on them.”

Another big reason for their success with calves, according to John, is that the Roberts house their calves in hutches beginning a few days after birth, Winter, as well as Summer. “The hutches keep them dry and draft free,” said John, “and we keep them all fed. That’s all they need.”

“It’s amazing to go out there to the hutches when it’s 20 degrees below zero and see those little calves come barreling out to eat,” he said. They tried putting two calves in one hutch in Winter but stopped doing that when they found one calf would suck the others ears and it would get frostbite. After a calf outgrows its hutch, the hutch is opened to sunlight and moved to a new location before a new calf moves in.”

John uses a scraper blade on his John Deere loader to clean out the gutters of the free stall barn and piles the manure outside. He spreads as often as possible. John said he is waiting to see whether their watershed area will become eligible for federally-assisted manure management systems before building a gravity flow pit system. The Roberts use sand for bedding the cows.

“We were having a mastitis problem that seemed to be caused by the sawdust,” said John. “We began thinking of alternatives and, since we have a gravel pit on the farm with pure sand at one end, we decided to try sand. The cows took to it right off. It doesn’t have organic matter in it so it won’t harbor bacteria.”

“Last Winter, the sand pile froze solid, so we bought a load of kiln dried sawdust. Within a week we had a mastitis problem again, so that was the last time we bought sawdust. Now, when our sand freezes, we buy it from a cement company for $120 for a 22 ton load that lasts about two months.”

Although their barn was built to house 100 cows, John and Lisa say they plan to keep their herd at about its present size and concentrate on improving quality. We’d like to move toward an all Brown Swiss herd and have an extra income from selling registered stock.”

Diversification
The Roberts are thinking seriously of ways to diversify their farm operation so as to put every acre to work. “But is it profitable to diversify and what do you diversify into?” They have begun thinning their woodlot and heat their house entirely with wood. They rent their sugarbush to a neighbor and are studying about growing Christmas trees.

John worked with sheep on farms in England, where, he says, farms tend to be more diversified than in the United States. He is thinking about raising some sheep in the future.

John and Lisa Roberts of Cornwall, Vermont with two of their three daughters: Jenny, 5½; and Heather, 3. Two-month-old Mary was asleep in her crib at picture taking time. In the background, a stack of round bales encased in plastic bag silos.

John would also like to diversify into the area of growing grains, especially barley, a popular crop in England. ”Barley is planted early in the Spring and harvested in mid-Summer, he said. ”The grain has higher fibre than corn and gives less energy, but the cows do nicely on it. It has the added benefit of providing excellent bedding. I tried growing a small amount of barley last year, but it was a disaster. I chose a field that was too wet to combine when harvest time came.”

John has wanted to be a farmer since he was a boy of eight in England. He grew up in the city of Newcastle, the son of the administrator of a regional hospital system. “I didn’t come from a farming family, but we took our Summer vacations in the country. At about age six or seven, I met a young couple who were tenant farmers near our cottage. They were nice people and I followed them around. It was a hill farm that raised sheep. I got interested and went there to help out every chance I got. Since that time there has never been a doubt in my mind that 1 wanted to be a farmer.”

“After high school, where I specialized in sciences, I went to a university to study agriculture. At that time, every student in agriculture had to spend a year on a farm before going to university. I decided to try something other than a hill farm, and went to work on a farm where they grew lots of wheat and barley.

“Agricultural students also had to work on a farm Summer vacations, so in the Summer of 1972, I was able to come to the U.S. to work on a farm,” John remembered. “I had relatives in this country and they referred me to the Webb farm in Shelburne, Vermont. They had Brown Swiss cows and there were none in England at the time and that interested me. I came to Vermont to work for Derrick Webb, it was interesting work, I enjoyed it, and that’s where I met Lisa, Derrick’s daughter.

“The next Summer, 1 decided to come back to work and I got to know Lisa better,” he said “I cam in the Summer of 1974. Lisa’s dad offered me a job as manager of the farm and Lisa and I were married in the Fall of ’74. She had been studying nursing at UVM.”

“I worked at Shelburne Farms for two and one-half years,” said John, “and then we decided to go and start our own farm. We began looking for a farm in the Fall of ’76. We looked all over New England, New York and Pennsylvania, but we kept coming back to Vermont because we liked it so much. We’re really pleased with this place.”