Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Corn mash is used to make what?

There are two basic foodstuffs for my cows. Hay is just dried grasses bundled into big fat unmanageable bales. Silage is far more interesting. I assume silage could be made from other things, but we make it out of corn. It’s far less complicated than growing corn to pick the ears off and rub the kernels off to make grain. To make corn into silage you simply drive a chopper through the field and cut down the entire plant and chop up the entire plant and than you have silage. This is blown out the back of the chopper into forage wagons (4 wheels, I’ll learn you yet). This is a silo. This is traditionally where silage is stored. Giant farm phallus. Drive the forage wagon up to the blower and shoot the wet chaff 100ft in the air. Let it compact. Hope it doesn’t explode. Then, in the winter, you simply lower the unloader off the ceiling and blow the stuff back down to an auger:
Viola. Fed cows. The unloader we have at the top of our silo is original. It’s the most scary piece of engineering we have on the farm. It shouldn’t work.

The second way to feed silage is the sea slug. Rather than go to all that wasteful effort to build a giant concrete tube we lay a plastic silo sized bag on the ground and fill it out horizontally.
Most people use a loader tractor to feed out of the bag. We build a fence all the way around the beached gastropod and feed out of it head, letting the cows only eat that which they can reach. Both the silo and sea slug are a little over half devoured. That's a good pace.

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