Wi | SOILcattleman - 9/7/2014 13:16 Could a person add to a bunker with out much additional spoilage? If I wanted to say build a bunker to feed a beef herd and the calves but wanted to be able to chop haylage and pile than finish up with corn silage to get my tonnage to get me thru the winter would this be achievable or would I need to go to a couple smaller bunkers? Or go with one large bunker with some sort of moveable walls?
You can add to them, but doing something like corn silage on top of haylage would be a bit of a pain. We will put multiple crops of haylage in the same bunker.
The numbers and advantages will vary for each farm. For a smaller operation Bags can be great. You need to maintain a certain amount of feedout for any of the systems to prevent spoilage and a huge bunker face doesn't work for a small herd. Uprights would work fine but I'd rather deal with a bag. Bag has no unloader to deal with, no doors to change, etc. Costs of bagging vary as well, if you hire a custom chopper you will need to hire a bagger to keep up with it. If you do your own chopping you could own or rent your own bagger. Theres a lot of large farms doing bags for feed as well, the large ones I know of that are making them still do bunkers/piles for corn silage though. Bags can be a mess if not dealt with properly. Theres a local farm that feeds a couple thousand cows with a lot of bags and they do an excellent job of keeping things neat. Their bags dont even sit on concrete or rock, they just go out to the bag and remove the feed they need for the feeding, then haul it back to the commodity shed where they load the mixer. They avoid making the deep muddy ruts you see everywhere and do not have spilled feed or plastic laying around.
Bunkers/piles can make great feed but it comes down to management again. Personally I like bunkers with no end walls. sidewalls save a lot of tires and plastic along with having a smaller overall footprint. Plus they keep the face much narrower which can be much nicer. To get quality feed with minimal spoilage you need to have some good operators in the pack tractors, and you need to have enough weight on the pile to get good density. We use two tractors with blades for haylage and try to add a 3rd pack tractor for corn silage. This is just to keep up with our 940 Claas at 180-190 tons of haylage per hour and around 220-230 tons of corn silage per hour. Good operators will know what they can push so they waste less time spinning out, and they will be able to make a nice even layer all the way up the pile without the need to "play with it" a lot meaning more time for packing. Get the walls packed tight and make the bunker into a big bowl while below the walls. Tight walls reduce spoilage and make it safer for the pack tractors. The bowl shape allows you to pack them tight without getting sucked into the wall. Once you get over the walls then you want to make a nice crown. A progressive wedge can fit more feed in it but will have more spoilage on the back face and can also end up with some pretty tall silage faces that can be hard to manage. A drive over pile will hold less but have higher quality feed. You don't have to save every ounce of feed, you have to decide what pencils out. If you need room for 10,000 ton of silage and the only way to fit it is a progressive wedge, then thats what you have to do. We split our corn silage pile in half at feedout to maintain a proper feedout rate. We loose some feed to spoilage down the center where we make the split, but we don't have the expense of a center wall and its nicer to fill it as one large bunker.
Lining the walls with plastic is important. As is the oxygen barrier before laying down the final layer of plastic. Buying your plastic in bulk 1,000' rolls will save a lot of money as well. Not buying name brand oxygen barrier also saves a lot of money. Covering nearly tire to tire gets the best results, its laborious but works. Labor to cover a bunker is not terrible. Have the local football team come out one night after school or on the weekend and then make them a huge dinner to eat afterwards. Offer to make a donation to the team as well. It's good training for them. Make sure to supply leather gloves.
If at all possible, face your bunkers North and South. Nothing worse than trying to face when the sun is coming up, or trying to pack when the sun is going down.
Edited by durallymax 9/8/2014 21:50
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silage storage questions
