Turning steers or cows onto freshly opened grazing corn, they will eat every ear before they eat anything else.  Even though I control the area open to the steers, their diet is very rich in grain the first couple days. Almost like eating straight ear corn. they do have hay behind them but eat the ears until they are all gone from the current section open to them.  Only when ears are about gone do the steers choose to eat the husks, leaves and upper stalk.

With the silage the cows are eating more of the rest of the plant with each mouthful, not like straight ear or shell corn.

With the silage I also only dump a couple buckets of silage in the wagon every 3 or 4 days.  In the end silage like I did it results in lower grain consumption. they also have hay behind them free choice.  When I load the silage wagon they do binge on it for a day but still lower grain consumption than grazing standing corn, then they go back to hay.

In the end, even though I fed silage only every couple days, my hay consumption/cow was about half of what it has been on hay only.

My silage was also not real good, an early grain variety put up dry. Mid 30's % moisture. Mostly the same variety this year but did add a couple rows on the planter of a silage variety.

Jim