Small scale silage harvesting

[WIZZO]

There are still some smaller farmers who want chopped silage but the big contractors won't do the small acreages with self propelled machines

This contractor runs his MF with trailed Claas forager.







The farmer uses his own 10 ton trailers and telescopic loader.

 

[tim s]

That would have been a "big" set up back in my day...the silage handling has really changed in the last 20 years..

 

[keh]

Late 1940s and early 1950s some farmers in the southeast US started small, 30 or so cow daries. Concrete block buildings with 6 or so milking stanchions. They had
24% protein ground feed deliverd, had pasture for grazing, and fed hay in the winter. To get better milk production, they tried to put up silage, or some did.
They usually could not afford an upright silo and would dig a trench silo. There was a stationary silage chopper, belt driven, that could have the discharge
directed into the trench and the silage packed with a tractor. One method was to use a corn binder which cut the standing corn and tied it into bundles. The
bundles were then hauled to the silage chopper and the bundles were fed by hand into the chopper. Lot of work. The equipment you show is a lot less labor
intensive.

KEH

 

[Bruce from Can.]

Looks just like what I do here in Canada.I milk 50-60 cows , and do all my own work. We do have dairys near
me that milk as many as 250 cows, but they usually hire a custom contractor. The interesting question in my
mind is who makes more money , the guy that does his own, or the farm that hires the big outfit.

 

[coonie minnie]

It certainly has. I have the two of the largest pull type choppers built, and keep one set up for hay, the other corn. I can keep 4-5 boxes busy, and do 60-80 acres of hay in a day without turning the lights on.

The neighbor hired a custom cutter this year... and I felt like a total Amishman!

If you think new combines are expensive, price a new self propelled chopper. It is really out of hand.

 

[phil_n]

The big outfit.

 

[Bruce from Can.]

Seen the price of milk lately ? Large custom cutters start at $500.00 per hour here, complete with trucks.

 

[phil_n]

I'm not a farmer - don't know how guys just wanting to make a decent living from doing it can. It seems more and more like that saying "Go big or go home" these days. (Or something like that.)

 

[coonie minnie]

If someone can make great feed with minimal investment, they win. It can be done.

And you can be the guy who hires the custom cutter, and gets his entire crop rained on, and fields chewed up.

It is all about management.

I am told by a long time ag lender that the custom guys usually always make their payment, but there is seldom much left over. The biggest issue is that as equipment gets bigger and more expensive, who buys it used?????

 

[john in la]

When I quit custom raising springers (in the mid 80's) most dairy farmers in my area had the mind set of "we milk cows". Average herd size at the time was 100 cows so they were milking 80.
Very few had more than a tractor and a brush cutter and a disc to clean grazing fields up as they grew nothing more than grass.
Winter rye seed; fertilizer; and lime were all applied by the co-op.
I made many a trip (over 500 miles) to Oklahoma to load small square bales of alfalfa and haul it back to La. dairy farms.

Today the few dairy farms left are milking 250 of 300 cows and are now bailing there own hay.
I'd say 90% of they still grow nothing more than grass and haul in all the corn and SOM.

 

[Bruce from Can.]

connie ,you are so right about the fields chewed up , and especially a newly seed field. Those big wagons a heavy and sink into the soft ground and leave terrible ruts. Most of the drivers of the forage trucks/wagons are Yahoos that can't get steady work, and drive around your farm like lunatics. I told my last custom guy to never come back, as his men caused too much damage. Go like the devil is chasing them , and then take a break , and stand around drinking coffee and smoking for a hour.

 

[NY 986]

There are more and more small farms hiring out custom harvesting of both silage and dry hay. There tends to be a limit the big custom guys can handle on a timely basis so depending where you are at you may still need to have your hay making and silo filling equipment to get done when the crop is ready. Small scale silo filling equipment is getting harder to find at least for high quality equipment. A person could open a regional farm newspaper 30 years ago and find most dairy region dealers having dozens of used pull-type forage harvesters each. I don't know that there is a dozen or two total pull-type in New York for sale at the dealers nowadays. Fiddling with machinery seemed like an necessary evil for most dairy farms years ago as they were more comfortable with the livestock end or the business. I knew extremely few dairymen that were comfortable with all aspects of the dairy farm business. Back to the subject at hand I kind of wonder if things got to a point where if some custom guys were forced out of business for any number of reasons what the clients would do to get their work done. With the price of milk where it is at I would hate to go to my lender about rebuilding my silo filling lineup especially with good value units being scarce. Take it one step at a time I guess.

 

[NY 986]

I just got thinking about a farm management tour I did while in college during the 1980's. Went to a farm that milked several hundred cows (as far as I can remember) but the guy had smallish equipment for the size. A couple 100 hp tractors and one smaller tractor and that was it for hp. His feeling was machinery costs had greatly outpaced labor costs so his approach was to run the wheels off the tractors along with a 2 row forage harvester and 6 row planter. Not quite run 24 hours a day but long days where you start and finish the day running the tractor lights. Now we see the other extreme with maxing out machinery size and doing custom work to help pay for it.

 

[Don-Wi]

I know for a farm the size my parents run, our big tractor (Oliver 1855) is small by most but more than is needed to run their acreage. The plus side is, I can work a job and still help get the farm work done on weekends, what used to take 3 weeks. Corn is no problem as long as there are no break downs. Even if there are, we have slightly more modern equipment and parts can be had quicker than they used to be since we went to a NH over the old Fox that we used to run. Last year the blower band puked out on our chopper. We had a new one the next day when Dad ran to the dealer- they had both the liner and the band in stock. I was never able to find a new one for the Fox so I'd have to spend a day or 2 patching the old one with sections cut out of the last one we removed, or chase around trying to find a 1/2 decent used one.

The hardest job is baling hay. It's hard to get the weather to work on my schedule, and we've got about 12 acres or so that got rained on to prove it... The forecast was clear thru Thursday so I cut some on Monday and Tuesday with our little haybine to help it dry down quicker. Wednesday we raked most of it and we were gonna bale on Thursday. Got permission from work to go in w few hours late and just work late. I was waiting for the dew to burn off, and by the time I started to get wagons around it started to sprinkle. Rained all day and the sun was out yesterday (Friday...) This weekend was supposed to be sunny, windy and dry. Now it's been cloudy, with some sprinkles and more of the same for tomorrow.

Hiring a custom guy to do it for us would only have cut up the fields with ruts big enough to swallow our baler and would have done more damage to the future crops. Today I was out with my 1600 and the crimper going over the hay just to get it picked up off the ground some and fluff it up, so it won't get quite so black and slimy (and then dusty when dry) before baling. All we need now are a few days of sun and wind to dry back out...

Donovan from Wisconsin

 

[slifnom]

Don, There is a Fox chopper for sale on craigs list near New Franken Wi. Look under farm and garden. Hay and corn head for $500. Looks in great shape.Look at Green Bay area.