Hay v silage
- Thread starter Coldbrook
- Start date
More to life
Member
- Location
- Somerset
Hay as there are no losses due to fermentation and the PH is neutral. But high quality grass can't be made into hay in the uk reliably.
@som farmer feeds hay and gets on well with it
Short of feeding it into a grass drier I’d think short wilt haylage (Tedded once) would be as good as could realistically be achieved but again would rely on deal weather
Foregoneconclusion
Member
- Location
- Pembrokeshire
If you make hay quickly without any mould then you will preserve all the energy and prot from the grass.
Nigh on impossible in the UK.
You can use dehumidifiers and fans to do the job for you if you harvest grass at top quality and then get it dry to 85 percent dm or higher within 48 hours..
I did this on a small scale with a bathroom dehumidifier blowing air over grass I had cut at leafy stage and left in the sun for 6 hours.. after 2 days grass was dry . Sent it for analysis. High me, high prot, high dry matter.. Very milky based on analysis and palatable too. Which is not surprising because it was basically spring grass with water pulled out! Better than any silage .
The tech exists to do this on fld scale and I fully expect it to become widely used on the UK in next 10 years!
Bog standard hay made in fld analyses low me 8 to 9 , low protein 9-10% and high in lignin..not a recipe for milk.
Nigh on impossible in the UK.
You can use dehumidifiers and fans to do the job for you if you harvest grass at top quality and then get it dry to 85 percent dm or higher within 48 hours..
I did this on a small scale with a bathroom dehumidifier blowing air over grass I had cut at leafy stage and left in the sun for 6 hours.. after 2 days grass was dry . Sent it for analysis. High me, high prot, high dry matter.. Very milky based on analysis and palatable too. Which is not surprising because it was basically spring grass with water pulled out! Better than any silage .
The tech exists to do this on fld scale and I fully expect it to become widely used on the UK in next 10 years!
Bog standard hay made in fld analyses low me 8 to 9 , low protein 9-10% and high in lignin..not a recipe for milk.
You full expect it to become widely used?
Why?
Sounds power hungry.
Whats wrong with silage?
Can you get sufficient intakes of 87%dm hay?
There’s nothing wrong with good silage, it’s the most commercially viable way to preserve quality winter forage.
During the drought 2 years ago on a searing hot windy day I lifted a load of clover heavy grass with the zero grazer,( bog standard grass nothing fancy mix wise) spread it out very thinly on recently concreted silo floor and after a day and some turning with a hand fork, swept it up and had it analysed, it was the most magnificent smelling pile of stuff I’ve ever seen, from memory it was 68dm 12.9me 26cp and 82d value, it’s not a viable way to make fodder but shows how much potential feed value is wasted in leaf losses at the field and fermentation losses in the silo
Foregoneconclusion
Member
- Location
- Pembrokeshire
Morning
It is relitavely power hungry yes. Certainly.
However. If you consider having all the prot and energy your cows will need in thier forage just think of the truck loads of cake that won't need to come onto your farm and all the built in energy gone into making those crops etc.
I took some samples from a farm in germany , had them analysed over here and ran them through my ration and reckoned that i would save 18k in one winter against an average of my silage results over the last few years. (maybe im really bad at making silage!)
Nothing wrong with silage. However you will always lose both energy and prot in this system and waste can be considerable. Just get your grass analysed before cutting and compare to analysis after and you;ll see.
Its a fermented crop so there are risks of loss no matter how good you are.
The type of system i am alluding too is used in mainland europe quite alot- even on small farms. Look it up here https://www.heutrocknung.com/en/hay-blog/the-story-of-hay-drying-in-luxembourg
i went on a study tour of brittany with a mob of french farmers and looked at 5 farms with hay drying barns and milking cows. Also Germany n Austria. Some magnificant herds of cows doing 7000 litres plus on hay and maize..so i guess intakes are no problem either.
I believe @vantage is using hsr kit and theres a hay drying system recently been commisioned on farm near oxford.
matthew
Member
- Location
- Cornwall, SW England
Gawd - I feel old.
We did barn dried hay, with grant aided cold air fans almost 50 years ago. Brilliant stuff, but very labour intensive as we made small bales and hand stacked them over a drying floor. Field losses minimal, product was off the scale for intake and quality.
With on farm leccy, and mechanical stacking, it could work again. And as said, continental farmers, with smaller herds, are already doing it. It's certainly better than many commercial cakes on the market, with a lot of hype and indifferent or indigestible ingredients.
- Location
- somerset
fed by necessity, but admit to being very suprised by how well they performed on it.
back in the 70's, barn dried hay was one of the 'new' techniques, along with vacuum silage, Hanford feeds made a big thing of including dried grass, and lucerne. They all worked quite well, but the first two fell by the way, simply on a scale issue, and hanford feeds, is long bought out.
We used to make a lot hay, from some old 'hay meadows', and that hay analysed out, suprising well, but a lot of clover etc, taste test, cows loved it, then we were given the ok to plough it.
Many of today's dairy farmers, are simplifying their systems, and not chasing high yields, so perhaps there is a place for hay again. That place would be very weather dependant ! Modern grasses would also take longer/harder to dry. We hope to make 30 acres of 2nd cut, on old grass, as hay, if the weather is iffy, = wrapped.
Started this post, before the ones above, perhaps with solar panels, or turbines, and the payment, could well help a revival, the weather risk, would be removed, but it is a good product, widely used in USA.
On vacuum silage, small farmer, that did a lot of our machinery repairs, decided to try some, asked for help to get the little bales in and stacked. No problem, what we didn't realise, exactly how heavy green grass actually weighs, in a little bale, all manhandled. The following year, he made 'proper' hay, as help was sadly lacking ! He fed it to his 30 odd cows, looked really nice stuff, but on a big scale.....
Last edited:
- Location
- M6 Hard shoulder
Alot will also depend on what fibre content said hay has, squitting cows are not everyone's idea of fun.
Helpinghand
Member
would work well, with Ad-lib ration cattle will need free access to a source of long fibre to keep the Rumen Healthy. lots of people have had great success in winter feeding it in place of expensive Straw.
Foregoneconclusion
Member
- Location
- Pembrokeshire
just watch the prot content. it may be very low.. but im no beef person so perhaps all they need is fibre and energy from the barley.
However , rumen works well when it has a good supply of protien.
Sorry, not me. Have enough trouble with silage given the high rainfall hereabouts!
Foregoneconclusion
Member
- Location
- Pembrokeshire
Quite.
a point that most of the farmers i talked to in brittany said was to avoid modern grass varieties as they tnd to be low fibre - big watery cells and not much lignin- . Generally speaking the leys the hay was being made from were full of herbs and clovers. (white) Not irgs or hybrids. So those hay samples were quite fibrous. But no less milky!
Foregoneconclusion
Member
- Location
- Pembrokeshire
oh.. sorry!!
Foregoneconclusion
Member
- Location
- Pembrokeshire
Thank you all I’m finding this all very interesting and with the barn dried hay of yesteryear looking to be coming back into vogue just goes show that there’s “nothing new under the sun” just the technology perhaps moving on to make the process more successful.
My own thoughts are that with climate change and carbon capture being the important issues of the day that we’ll probably all be organic ( for want of a better word) within the next decade as bagged fert comes to an end and that the idea of of buying in lorry loads of concentrated feed to feed to ruminants will also be harder to justify, both on a cost and environmental basis, therefore self sufficiency will become more important.
Species rich non rye grass swards (flower meadows) are already being talked about as the next big thing in carbon sequestration terms, so if there’s money to be made planting them then why not, ruminants will still be required to complete the carbon cycle and I feel there will always be a demand for milk, so perhaps hay drying systems like the one in the article above may become a familiar sight in the Uk
My own thoughts are that with climate change and carbon capture being the important issues of the day that we’ll probably all be organic ( for want of a better word) within the next decade as bagged fert comes to an end and that the idea of of buying in lorry loads of concentrated feed to feed to ruminants will also be harder to justify, both on a cost and environmental basis, therefore self sufficiency will become more important.
Species rich non rye grass swards (flower meadows) are already being talked about as the next big thing in carbon sequestration terms, so if there’s money to be made planting them then why not, ruminants will still be required to complete the carbon cycle and I feel there will always be a demand for milk, so perhaps hay drying systems like the one in the article above may become a familiar sight in the Uk
betweenthelines
Member
- Location
- southwest
People are already going hungry and World population keeps rising, so demand for food will keep increasing and take priority over minor carbon emissions issues in food production.
Don't forget photosynthesis out trumps everything else in terms of low carbon food and energy creation.
Don't forget photosynthesis out trumps everything else in terms of low carbon food and energy creation.