Alternative Crops for Ensiling

Alternative Crops for Ensiling
Many crops other than grass can be used for ensiling. The baling process offers farmers an ideal method of testing the use of these crops without committing the substantial resources required to fill a silage clamp, let alone to build a new one.

For more information, see the Forage Options section.

Conserving Maize without a Clamp
Clamps have significant capital costs associated with them, and crops stored in them cannot be readily moved, bought or sold.

For this reason, developing a cost-effective way in which maize could be ‘packaged’ into more easily handled units would provide benefits to small farms in particular.

A spokesperson from Norwegian machinery manufacturer Orkel, which has introduced a baler/wrapper for maize, says their machine compresses and wraps organic short materials in round bales.

Short materials have always been a problem because they can’t be ‘rolled’ in the way other forages normally are. Packing short forages into a bale means maize (always chopped), short length grass and short length forages can now be conserved in a more flexible manner. Cost of this novel machinery will remain the only barrier.

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