Top-quality silage remains a pipe dream

I seem to recall a CAFRE sheep adviser telling us (at a BDG meeting) that, irrespective of how good our baled silage was, it could never match the performance achieved from similar grass ensiled in a traditional clamp.

I can’t remember if it had to do with chop length or fermentation, but plenty of practical experiments have proven this to be the case.

Nevertheless, the baled option is ideally suited to all aspects of winter feeding on this farm and therefore all my grass is mowed, tedded, baled and wrapped.

Which brings us very nicely onto the thorny issue of analysing said bales and the list of excuses I can dream up to convince myself that I make high-quality fodder.

Result

This year’s silage has thrown up exactly the same result as every other season, with an analysis that, on paper at least, is disappointing.

Most of my swards are grazed off till early spring (or beyond), fertilised, and typically cut during the latter part of May and occasionally into early June.

They are not early varieties of grass, rarely yield more than nine bales per acre (often six or seven ties them) and I would describe the grass as leafy with a spattering of headed material through it.

In addition, I endeavour to make high dry matter silage, so I like to play with a six-rotor tedder as part of the process.

This is partly for the practicality of handling dry grass, partly because of my conviction that sheep perform measurably better when fed this silage, and partly because I really enjoy cruising up and down the fields with the tedder hurling the grass across the stubble.

It’s one of those farming jobs that you have to pretend counts as real work.

Excuse

My main excuse centres on the theory that high dry matter bales do not analyse as well as they perform.

Obviously, I haven’t arrived at this conclusion by using pinpoint performance figures and reams of collected data.

I prefer to use a half-cocked notion that a lovely sward of drying, aromatic, leafy grass is bound to be rocket fuel when offered to all classes of livestock (especially pregnant sheep).

Typically, analysis shows my bales to have a dry matter of at least 30%, an ME of around 10, and a protein content of around 12%.

Irrespective of whether my bales are mediocre or decent, I remain certain that intake trumps all other requirements for winter fodder, and perhaps my assertion that very dry grass is preferable for pregnant ewes has some merit.

The suitable field conditions during December 2024 have thrown up an interesting conundrum around palatability, with two larger flocks requiring a couple of round bale feeders in each field.

I feed them two at a time and like to experiment with different bales to see if I can find a link between analysis and intake.

I thought I was making headway when a sample from a field at home was eaten in preference to one of my rented swards.

But then, to further this trial, I put in bales from the same field and discovered that none of my ewe flocks ever eat two bales at an identical speed – it just does not happen.

Therefore, if one bale is eaten before the other, does this mean it is a higher-quality feed? If I analyse these two bales, would one throw up a different analysis from the other?

And of course, this leads to the inevitable conclusion that perhaps analysing bales is a complete waste of time and money?

Claim

If the swards I am baling are ideal for making into winter fodder, then maybe I should stand by my claim about making good quality silage.

However, all this would be so much easier if I could, just once, take a sample that came back with a fantastic result.

But then I would become the biggest bore on the planet, desperate to regale every farmer I met with tales of my brilliance. Sometimes you’ve got to be careful what you wish for.