Tag Archive for: Corn Silage

Consistent Dairy Feed Planning During Times Of Uncertainty

As evident by this year, life is full of uncertainty, and dairy farmers face this every day in their operation. To best mitigate this, it is sometimes best to look at history for clues into where our operation is headed. By looking ahead, we can adjust early to ensure a successful year overall.

Now that harvest season is (mostly) behind us, we must live with what is in our bunkers, on our feed pads, or in our bags and silos until next year. By sampling the feed on the way in, there should be little surprise when we open the new feed and get it in front of the cows, heifers, or dry cows.

Kyle Sigg takes a sample of freshly chopped corn silage to send to our lab.

To some extent, we never quit adjusting our operation. The farmers with the most productive and profitable dairy cows make minuscule changes on a daily, weekly, monthly, and even yearly basis. Taking questions out of the operation builds sustainability. Capitalizing on what has worked in the past and building from success broadens the landscape of profitability.

In the world we currently live in, we all have access to instant information like never before. By questioning our decisions and the inputs we go into next spring based on research, leaving no room for the careless mistakes.

Making substantial adjustments to your operation without a distinct strategy is not a solid business plan. Adapting to new ideas and implementing ideas with a plan, however, is an excellent approach. Many of the best results are yielded because there was a clearly defined plan set for it from the beginning.

When dairy margins are tight, having a plan and specific approach while keeping the end goal in mind is essential. By increasing small efficiencies and extrapolating them over our operation, we get less affected by uptrends and downtrends in the marketplace over time, which is a place we cannot control. By acknowledging what we cannot control and controlling what we can, we remain in the driver’s seat of our dairy for the long haul. At Prairie Estates Genetics, our philosophy focuses on absolute consistency, creating better results year over year.

Kyle Sigg
Forage Manager
Prairie Estates Genetics

6 Ways To Make Sure Your Corn Silage Is High Quality

The sales season is upon us. Dairy farmers are inundated by salesmen pretending to be silage experts without grasping or understanding quality corn silage.

Many facets go into producing good silage:
• Good Agronomy Program
• Consistent High Yielding Varieties
• Consistent Dry Matter
• Consistent High Starch Content of High Quality (Digestibility)
• Consistent Fiber Content & Good Digestibility
• Processing Scores
• Proper Packing
• Good Bunker Management

At Prairie Estates Genetics, we believe defining and understanding quality sets us apart from others who want to sell you seed corn. Many do not even know what they have or know how their numbers were evaluated. We do.

PEG Senior Forage Manager, Carl Key spraying different fertilizers on silage plots
to analyze hybrid response based on tissue samples and forage analysis.

#1 – The differences in fiber and starch content between NIR and wet chemistry can be vast. We use only wet chemistry, which is the most accurate but expensive. Why? Because particle size distribution differences between hybrids of both fiber and starch are difficult to detect by NIR. With today’s harvest equipment, we also see differences in processing scores that NIR does not pick up. Testing for digestibility using NIR is even more inaccurate.

#2 – When we have our varieties tested for digestibility, we use only Tilley Terry Invitro. The type of methodology differences between AnKom and Tilley Terry Invitro are very different. Using the AnKom system, bags are circulated through rumen fluid. The bags are porous with tiny holes to allow fluid to wash through silage. Some silage is lost and affects the weight of material that is reweighed. Using the Tilley Terry Invitro system, silage is weighed and put into a glass flask with rumen fluid and shook up for 24 or 30 hours, then reweighed, thus, resulting in no loss of silage. This system is much more accurate and expensive.

#3 – Prairie Estates Genetics will be the only seed company adjusting data from hybrid trials to reflect adjustments for moistures to a standard of 35% DM for fiber content, starch content, digestibility, and Kd. Adjustments for moisture correction for yields are already being made, but not for content or quality. Without those numbers, the data is virtually useless.

#4 – We make sure that lag times are 2.5 hours or less.

#5 – We make sure that the lab is using a specific Buffer Fluid. Digestion can decrease quickly is not inoculated with enough and correct buffer.

#6 – Rumen Dynamic Digestible Carbohydrates (RDDC) is our measuring tool for hybrid evaluation. It utilizes moistures content, multiple pools of fiber and starch digestibility, diet Kp, body weight, and several other factors to project percent of RDDC by DM.

Several flawed equations are being used today to evaluate silage. None compare to RDDC.
A. Milk 2006 – Milk/acre Milk/ton very poor, no consideration for starch quality.
B. TTNDFd – Total Track Digestibility: Corresponds with 48-hour digestion rates. The fiber is long gone – poor equation.
C. uNDF – Gives accurate indigestible fiber numbers but is inadequate for hybrid selection. We have seen projections where differences in uNDF of 2 points projects intakes and milk projections over 2#?

Prairie Estates Genetics has spent the last 30 years working exclusively with Dairymen. Planting PEG hybrids for 2021 could be the best investment you make. Leadership, Consistency, and Quality…No one else can make that claim.


Carl Key
Senior Forage Manager
Prairie Estates Genetics