SE Manitoba | CIH Farmer - 12/6/2018 07:12
Curious what you guys usually see for feed shrink. Talking so if you pile 20,000 bushels (1,120,000 lbs for easy figuring) of ground wet corn or earlage or silage, what would you expect to end up being lost?
Also if you grind wet corn at say 27%, after packing and tarping, how much water content do you lose?
TIA!
Any numbers I have are from quite a number of years ago so others will have much more recent information for you.
What you are actually going to find if you look into this closely is that you have 3 places for shrink.
1. processing losses
2. storage losses
3. feeding losses
4. quality losses
The first 3 are fairly self explanatory but the third one isn't.
The process of ensiling uses plant material to change the pH of the product. This is not necessary a large amount of the original but at 20k bushels I think it is worth considering.
Offsetting these quality losses is the increased digestibility of the product. That digestability will vary depending upon variables like the pH and time and likely even more that I'm not remembering right now.
Just in case someone doesn't think any of this is important let's do some calculations.
2% losses in each of the 4 - - you have 92.23% of original.
3% losses in each of the 4 - - you have 88.53% of original
4% losses in each of the 4 - - you have 84.93% of original
Storage losses of under 5% are quite rare.
Feeding losses of under 3-4% are going to be challenging to get.
Processing losses you might be able to keep that in the 1-2% range.
Quality losses can range from 2-30% if not even higher so this is an area that deserves careful attention.
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feed shrink
