What Do Cattle Eat? - Silage harvest

In this episode of Feedyard Learning Center, we talk to Cattle Empire's Risk Manager, Wayne, about how Tritcale (also called "silage") is harvested and stored. Tritcale provides cattle with nutrients such as protein, fiber, and minerals as a part of a balanced diet. Silage can be made from a variety of different crops depending on what is available in the local area, and triticale is just one of the crops we use. Triticale is a wheat/rye hybrid that grows tall and produces more pounds per acre than wheat, therefore making more feed while using fewer natural resources.

So yeah, what we're doing here now is we are chopping triticale. We would have come up - lets see - earlier this morning we would have swathed this. So these plants were probably almost five foot tall. So we come in here with a swather and lay it on the ground, and then I don't know if you can see that machine over there... the rake. What it'll do is it will take... I think they're putting two windrows into one, which will make this big pile that you see right here. So the chopper, what it's doing is it's picking up these windrows and as it's chopping it it puts it in the truck and then those trucks deliver that to the feed yard. So this field here I think our average yield this season is going to be around 12 ton to the acre. So this field here will produce about 1500 tons and lets see here - it will take roughly about 6 hours to harvest this circle. Triticale, it is in the wheat family. It's just a variety that has been built for forage purposes. You usually get about 15 to 20 percent more tons out of triticale than you would just traditional wheat. We adjust triticale to 65% moisture so we try to get, you know, when we harvest that we want to harvest it as close to 65 percent moisture as we can. As we're harvesting that we bring that in on trucks and we put it in a drive over pile or a pit of some sort that we have packing tractors that pack the triticale as its being received. So we pack it as much as we can to get all the air out of it and then we put plastic on it and tires to keep air from getting to it because that's what damages your your silage.