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Need a little help with silage math.
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WJKEIGER
Posted 9/17/2020 13:01 (#8500774 - in reply to #8499854)
Subject: RE: Need a little help with silage math.


nw NC
The moisture content of that chopped corn will explain why you are disappointed in the weight yield of the crop. Your corn does not appear to be tall in height. The leaves are fired to the ears and above. The husks are all brown. The ears that you picture appear to be far enough along (to me) to have little milk line left in them. Corn plants at stages described above will have little sap left in the pith of the stalk. In other words the weight of moisture is not there. You stated, " It was on the dry side of perfect in my opinion". I'm saying that the moisture content of that chopped corn was much lower than you think, therefore resulting in the disappointing weight yield. Moisture is weight and it gets gone fast sometimes.

Info that I read stated that 1% point of moisture removed from one ton of corn silage is 7 gallons of water weighing 58.38 lbs. The weight difference in 65% moisture silage and 60% moisture silage would be 292 lb/ton. If your corn was at 60% and it yielded 14.15 tons/acre, if it were at 65% it would have weighed 4,130 lbs ( 2.065 tons) more per acre =16.21 tons/acre. To go a little farther, if your corn was 58% moisture at 14.15 tons/acre , at 65% it would have been 17.04 tons/acre. Farther yet, if yours were 58% at 14.15 ton/acre and you had chopped it at 70% it would have been 19.10 tons acre. Corn for silage has to be BIG and TALL and WET to make the heavy weight yields that are bragged about. A friend once told me about his neighbors discussing their big silage yields. He told them, "Yes, it is easy to get 25-30 tons/acre if you do not go across scales with it. Once you start going over scales, it becomes a LOT harder!

Best way to get near accurate estimate of silage yield before cutting is to take a few average stalks from a field, cut them into lengths that will fit in a bucket or basket and weigh them for an average per stalk weight. Multiply by your plant population per acre to get yield. I venture to say that your stalks, ear and all, are weighing about one pound. You planted 32,000. Your actual plant pop. at 29,000 X one pound/stalk would be 29,000 lbs = 14.5 tons/acre which is very close to what you calculate.

So, with all the above being said, what are you going to do? At $40 ton X 14.15 ton/acre =$566/acre, did that cover cost of production? You are thinking that you should have yielded 23.3 ton/acre at $40 = $932/acre. My opinion is that your corn would have yielded about 19 ton/acre at 70% moisture X $40 = $760/acre. Grain yield at 175 bu/acre X $4.00 bu would be $700 /acre. If you think it would have made 175 bu/acre , you would have been better off shelling it. I do not mean to be rough on you, but it looks to me like you made a deal for $40 ton and it did not yield what you thought it would. Valuable lesson learned.



Here are links to some posts that I made 4 years ago regarding my silage yields. Please take time to review them. Some interesting comments as to the estimates/guesses of my corn yields. The stalks of corn being harvested in the pictures seen in the first link below, weighed 1.3659953 lbs per plant. Compare them to your corn. In my experience , most growers over estimate by quite a bit what they think their corn silage yields.
https://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=660473&posts=2...
https://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=660839&posts=9...
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