I think Spring might finally be arriving here in Northern Illinois. Although, I suppose the jury is still out, since yesterday when I woke up there was that nasty white stuff all over the ground. It didn't stick around long.
Every day you can tell it is a little warmer and that the sun stays out just a little longer. I love being able to walk to my car after my last class gets out around 4:30 and it still be light outside.
Another sign of changing seasons? This last week we opened the silo.
 |
That big concrete thing to the left. (Also notice the little white "house" at the bottom.)
I can't believe that I don't have a picture of the whole silo!
Gotta add that to my list. |
Opened the silo? How or why would a person do that?
I'm glad you asked.
Silos hold silage. Silage is yet another type of feed we give the cattle. It is made up of the entire, still slightly green, corn stalk, chopped up into little bits. It can be stored three seperate ways. You can store it in a large pile covered in a plastic sheet, you can store it in an ag bag (a giant plastic bag), or you can store it in a silo. Any way you store it the same thing happens. After it is stored, the silage undergoes anaerobic fermentation. Now, I'm not a scientist, and I can't exactly explain what that means. All I know is that it makes it taste sweet, and it makes it smell funky. It doesn't smell so bad when you harvest it, but it definitely smells bad when you unload it.
Another important thing to note about silage, it is WARM. All the time. Even when out doing winter chores you can stand in the little house at the bottom of the silo and it will be warmer inside because of the silage. In the summer it can be almost unbearable to stand anywhere near the silo house while doing chores. It just gets too hot.
 |
I got this picture from a website called Quality Silage.com.
It is what corn silage looks like, which is what we have on our farm.
This website is all about silage and how to produce better quality silage.
Funny the things you can find on the internet when you look for them. |
I really like our silo. It is the "old school" way of doing things. It can certainly make feeding the silage out easier (which you'll see near the end of this post), but first you have to get through "opening" it.
In order for the silage to ferment, there has to be a lack of oxygen. In a silo it is practically impossible to ensure that the inside of the roughly 60 foot tall structure is air tight. Naturally, there is some silage that isn't any good to feed. This is generally near the top of the silo. Silos unload from the top down. Do you see the problem?
Last Sunday, John, Austin, his cousin Mitch, and I geared up and headed out to open the silo. We had three shovels, the manure spreader, and all the fuses we could find.
We backed the manure spreader up to the door, and John began the trek up the side of the silo.
 |
The Manure Spreader. I'll do a separate post about this piece of machinery later.
I don't want to clog my blog up with all the literal crap that goes along with the spreader. |
RULE #1 OF SILO OPENING: Do not look up. You don't know what will fall down.
 |
It is hard to see because it is so dark, but there is a ladder in the gray tube that runs up and down the side of the silo.
You can sorta see John climbing the ladder to the top.
He says he will take my camera up sometime and take a picture of the silo unloader. |
John climbed up to the top of the silo and started preparing the unloader. First thing to fall from the top of the silo was a long heavy chain. Second thing to fall was a Raccoon. It was still alive. Moral of the story, don't put your head under the tube to try and see what is going on. You'll get yourself hurt.
 |
That, or you'll get a face full of silage. Believe me, you don't want it.
John got the unloader ready at the top of the silo, and Austin turned on the power on the ground. |
After a few stalls, during which we went through about 5 fuses ran back to the shed to find some tools and Austin had to climb to the top to help his dad, we were finally well on our way to getting rid of the bad silage out of the silo and being able to feed the good silage.
Getting the unloader to work properly can be a total pain in the butt. As silos get older the unloading equipment tends to wear out, and the equipment is VERY expensive to replace. This is why so many people now just use ag bags or the giant mounds that I was talking about earlier. Silos on many farms are basically abandoned, and now just hold garbage and junk.
Mitch and I stayed at the bottom and shoveled out all the nasty, rotten silage with grain shovels into the Manure Spreader so we could dispose of it. We wouldn't want to make the cattle sick feeding it to them.
 |
| The chute closed over the auger. |
Now comes the exciting part. Feeding out the silage. Our cows love silage. They think it is candy I guess. There is a sort of chute at the bottom of the ladder that you can close so that silage feeds more neatly into the auger that carries it out into the feeding bunk. The auger then carries the silage out into the feeding bunk where the cows can get at it. Which really reduces the amount of work for our skid loader.
 |
Here you can see the silage falling down into the auger that carries the silage out of the silo house
and into the feed bunk. |
 |
| The cattle. Enjoying a feast of grain and silage. |
And that is it! The silo is open and the cows can eat some silage and get really big and fat.
Any questions? Leave them in the comments below! Stay tuned to my blog for some upcoming posts with pictures of our new calves! You can also subscribe to my blog through your email. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and enter your email address, and you'll get an email when I publish new posts.
