The Extension Team Forage website brings together a variety of forage crop related resources including variety trial results, harvest & storage, economics & budgets, and feeding & testing.
Nitrate poisoning is a condition that may affect ruminants consuming certain forages or water that contains an excessive amount of nitrate. Horses are much less sensitive to nitrate toxicity since they are hindgut ferments and do not have a rumen.
Most dairy farmers do not have a drive-over scale available on their farms. Frequently it would be useful to know the weight of forage harvested from a field. Measuring alfalfa or corn silage yield is necessary to adjust management practices, to maintain crop inventories, and for crop reporting purposes.
The optimum crop to plant in an emergency forage situation should be determined by 1) when and how it will be utilized, 2) the forage quality needed, and 3) seed availability and cost.
What happens to corn silage yield and quality with later planting dates? The following is a summary of planting date trials conducted at Arlington, WI. The objective of these trials is to measure the impact of planting date on corn forage yield and quality.
Accurately determining corn whole plant moisture is important when harvesting for corn silage. Harvesting corn for silage too early (high moisture content) or too late (low moisture content) can affect forage yield, quality and silage fermentation.
Garnering much recent interest by dairy producers and their nutritionists has been a new method of harvesting whole-plant corn for silage. The resultant product has been called corn shredlage by the developer of the process Shredlage™
Plant sugars are fermented by anaerobic bacteria to organic acids which reduce the pH of the plant material. This process preserves the crop during long-term storage.
Routine laboratory forage analysis of corn silage typically includes percent starch determination for the feed. Nutritionists utilize this information to partition Non-Fiber Carbohydrate (NFC) portions into % starch, % sugar and other NFC components to optimize production and animal health.
Lactobacillus buchneri is a bacterial inoculant approved for use in grass silages, corn silage, legume silage and high moisture grains. Lactobacillus buchneri has been demonstrated to improve aerobic stability of silages by reducing the growth of yeasts.
Understanding the relationship between corn grain and forage yield is important to dairymen and grain farmers who often contract with each other for corn silage production.
Sweet corn is enjoyed by people across the United States. Some sweet corn is harvested and sold directly to the consumer (i.e. corn on the cob). The rest of the sweet corn is processed, packaged and/or combined with other food products through a processor. Sweet corn production produces byproducts that can be fed to livestock. They include sweet corn stalks (stalklage left on the field after harvest), sweet corn silage (from bypassed acres that were not harvested), and corn canning factory waste (sweet corn waste).
