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Silage pits will now be opened for winter feeding livestock.
Once opened, it is important the clamp face is properly managed to prevent silage from spoilage, heating or slippage.
Poor clamp management will undo all your efforts to harvest grass at the optimum stage of growth and ensile evenly in the clamp.
Outlined are five steps to good clamp management.
1. Don’t expose too much silage when pulling back the cover
Pulling back the cover is a job few farmers enjoy. While it may seem handier to remove as much of the cover as you can when on top of the clamp, this is not always a good idea.
Silage is made in anaerobic conditions. Once the cover is removed and silage is exposed to air again, the forage will start to deteriorate.
If silage starts to heat, bacteria will use up the sugars in the forage that would otherwise drive animals' performance. Palatability will also become an issue
Also, with unroofed clamps, once the cover is removed, rain water will wash mycotoxins from any mould present down through the clean silage you intend on feeding to cattle. Only pull the cover back to match the depth the sheer grab cuts.
2. Remove waste silage immediately
Once you do remove the cover, remove all mould from the top of the clamp immediately. This reduces the risk of rain water washing mycotoxins down through the clamp and leading to cattle health or performance issues.
3. Move across the pit face as quickly as possible
Work from one side of the clamp face to the other inside one week. This keeps the clamp face fresh and stops silage turning black or heating.
If it takes longer than one week to work across the pit face, do not drive the shear grab into its full depth when cutting blocks.
Taking shallower grabs will speed up the rate at which you work across the clamp face and reduce waste accumulating.
4. Always cut from top to bottom in sequence
As well as working across the pit, cut grabs in consecutive columns from top to bottom. When the cut is taken in the right sequence, it reduces the surface area of the clamp face exposed to air.
Do not start cutting blocks from different areas along the pit face just because some layers are better than others. This increases the surface area of the clamp.
Where blocks that should have been cut are deliberately skipped over, there will be higher levels of waste silage accumulating.
5. Sharpen the shear grab regularly
A sharp shear grab will cut cleanly and seal the pit face as blocks are removed. If the grab is leaving a ragged, untidy clamp face, the cutting blades need to be sharpened.
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