Silos and Silage

[chim]

Robert, we live near TMI, and the first time I saw the big round white things in the field, I figgered the radiation affected the marshmellow crop..............chim

 

[Ozarker]

Thanks Spence and Bird.

So lets see. You whip up a batch of fermented food, get the cows drunk. Then what??????????? /w3tcompact/icons/laugh.gif

 

[wroughtn_harv]

It's for winter feed. When I was a kid they put just about everything in there, maize, barley, corn, all of it. But then it was in concrete pits.

They fed the cows with self unloading trailers. When the alfalfa was in they'd feed it to them as green feed. You'd have one tractor pulling the cutter-grinder and it'd be shooting the stuff off to the side into a self unloading trailer being pulled by another tractor. When it was full there'd be another ready to move in for it's load.

The farmer had a contract with Farmall. They'd give him tractors to work for testing purposes. I remember the time dad was so proud cause he had what he thought was the first one ever with powersteering.

Winter time they'd fill the self unloading trailers with the silage instead of green feed.

The trailers were pretty neat. They had chutes at the front and the feed was brought forward bya live bottom up to another live bottom running perpendicular to the main one. Then the live bottom feeding off to the side would shoot the feed into the trough. It all worked off the PTO of the tractor.

Most of them were tricycles and they all ran on propane.

My dad worked mixing feed for two dairies, one holstein for milk, and one jersey for cream products and milk. He also did the feed for twenty thousand layers. There were about twelve hundred or so cows in each dairy if I remember right.

One time we had two hundred and fifty head of hereford heifers on the place. The place of course was eighty acres. The man my father worked for over the years had bought up all these small farms. He then provided a roof, salary, and milk for the help.

We also got eggs and occasionally we'd get ten or so wore out hens to butcher. But every night when we went to pick up dad we'd take a big mouth gallon jar and go into the dairy and right from the big stainless tank fill it up, fresh raw milk. If were lucky or unlucky, purely point of perspective, we'd get the little black specs too.

Then there was the time dad messed up and had four forty come in one hand and out the other. He always said he never really had a hairy chest until after that. But he was off work for six weeks or so. Across the street from us was eighty acres or so of watermellon. The old boy that owned it told us to help ourselves. Even the dog and cats got by on watermelon for awhile.

I remember going down to the silage pit. It was a lot more coarse than the stuff Bird was describing. It had big chunks and didn't smell all that good to a kid's nose.

We were so poor that we didn't know it. That's poor.

 

[packer man]

hey thats my fathers crew there do you have anymore photos i would love to see them as he was not an advid photo taker of the past

 

[Bird]

Wow! This is an old thread. So I posted 3 of the photos I made that day. I do have some more but they may not be any different. But anyway . . .

 

[tcreeley]

When we got into dairy farming in Mass, we didn't have a silo. We built one from wood slat snow fence and black plastic- stacked 4 layers or so high. Later we bought some silos- hoops and everything and reassembled them on our farm. We had a chopper blowing the corn into our truck. We unloaded by an electric motor winch that rotated a shaft at the end of the body hooked to two cables pulling a sliding back board . The silage was hooked off the truck by hand and down onto a belt driven conveyor (power unit/tractor) that carried it into the blower, The blower shot it up the vertical pipes (bolted together) and into the silo. The smell was sweet- and the temtation to chew on a piece of fresh corn was strong. A week later suds were bubbling between the upright seams of the silo walls. It was the start of the fermentation. Cows loved it fresh, or in the middle of the winter. It always had a moistness to it. You could tell when cows were started on silage because the milk tasted differently. -Winter feed - supplement the hay/grain.
We ground dried ears of corn for grain too, but I always enjoyed working with fresh silage.
_Back then the tall blue painted steel Harvestore silos were what upcoming New England farmers started to put up as the farms grew bigger.

 

[Bird]

hey thats my fathers crew there do you have anymore photos i would love to see them as he was not an advid photo taker of the past

packer man, do you and/or your father live in that area? Incidentally, for those who didn't already know it, that bunker is on the east side of State Highway 171 just a little southeast of Hillsboro, TX.

 

[tude]

I had a neighbor nearby who put up green grass silage when I was growing up. His silos were always leaking green fluid and in the spring gave off the most rancid smell I ever experienced when he aired them out. I stacked hay on the silage wagons in the summer. The tail board was moved to the back of the wagon and the hay was stacked in front of it. I do like the smell of corn silage. It reminds me of the old GLF feed store my Grandfather and I visited. It must be the sweet molasses smell. My grandfather cut his corn by hand when first started out in the 1920's.

 

[idaho2]

Back many moons ago, we had piglets slurp up the juice from the silo about a week after filling it. Little buggers could not walk a straight line, staggering and squealling as they headed back to mama sow. They were drunk. :licking:

 

[tcreeley]

Every so often when the pasture was low, or the weather was not promising, we'd cut, bale and feed it that night- solid green grass bales. They were heavy and a pain to handle over a distance!