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Don Borgschatz
Zabel Borgschatz Dairy
Plainview, Minnesota
Wabasha County
200 cows

Describe your farm and facilities. We have a 3-row, sand-bedded and drive-thru freestall barn. We use a double-9 herringbone parlor for milking.

What forages do you harvest? We harvest alfalfa, corn silage and rye grass. We cut all the ditches and waterways and make grass hay out of that as well.

How many acres of crops do you raise? It’s around 470 acres tillable.

Describe the rations for your livestock. The milk cows right now are at an 80% corn silage and 20% haylage for forage along with the base concentrates. The dry cows are getting straw, corn silage and a little haylage. The pre-fresh group gets a lot of straw and corn silage. Heifers clean house; they’ll get whatever refusal the dairy cows have from the day before plus a lot of straw, corn silage and haylage.

What quality and quantity do you harvest of each crop? I chop an earlier variety of corn silage, and we are at about 22 ton an acre. For my haylage, I’ve just done a three-crop program the last couple of years. It’s a low-lignin alfalfa variety. I’m feeding dry corn that gets powdered. It’s around 15 pounds of dry corn per cow.

Describe your harvesting techniques for alfalfa and corn silage. John Speltz, a dairy farmer by Altura, Minnesota, has a harvest crew, chopper, trucks and packing tractor. We coordinate with him for chopping the haylage and harvesting the corn silage. We also have a hay cutter and cut some of the hay ourselves.

What techniques do you use to store, manage and feed your forages? All the silages are on drive-over piles/bunkers. We’ll do some baleage for hay and sometimes rye.

Describe a challenge you overcame in reaching your forage quality goals. The last few years, I’ve gotten more comfortable feeding rye to the milk cows. We planted rye after the corn silage, and we’ve been harvesting that and then planting soybeans on that ground the next season. It looks like you’re putting in straw sometimes, but somehow, the cows milk great on it. I’m learning to go after the rye early enough to make good quality feed. The rye can go from milk cow feed to dry cow feed really fast, within a period of four or five days, so the harvest window for rye for milk cows was a challenge.

How do quality forages play a part in the production goals for your herd? Feeding highly digest-ible feed is going to help us get the most out of what our cows can do. Having highly digestible corn silage and making some really nice rye are important.

What are management or harvesting techniques you have changed that have made a notable difference in forage quality? Changing our feed system over to piles so that a harvesting crew can bring in the feed in a matter of days, which used to take us weeks, has made the biggest impact on the quality and consistency of the product.

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