Forage Profile: Chris Schueler

Describe your farm and facilities. We house around 900 cows in a cross-ventilated, recycled sand-bedded freestall barn and milk them in a 40-stall rotary parlor. We’re located five miles south of Willmar, Minnesota, and have been in the dairy business since 1983.

What forages do you harvest? We harvest haylage, corn silage and winter triticale.

How many acres of crops do you raise? 1,150 acres.

Describe the rations for your livestock. We utilize corn silage, haylage, beet pulp, soybean meal, canola meal, mineral premix, dry corn, palm fat, high oleic soybeans and sweet energy.

What quality and quantity do you harvest of each crop? We feel the timing of harvest greatly affects both quality and quantity in both corn silage and haylage-triticale. Being willing to set a cutting schedule for hay crops and sticking with it, mainly being dictated by the calendar, is usually the best option in the long run. Avoiding traditionally wet weather patterns is good practice as well. Stage of growth/maturity of each crop, along with proper moisture management, seems to be the difference between mediocre forage and great forage.

Describe your harvesting techniques for alfalfa and corn silage. Anything harvested in a windrow is cut in a wide, thin windrow and minimally conditioned to minimize loss of valuable sugars. We also expedite the timeframe to be able to chop. We strive for adequate stubble for faster recovery for the next cutting, along with minimizing ash content in the ensiled product. We then merge and chop right behind when proper moisture is reached. On our farm, we would rather be a touch dry than too wet and deal with butyric haylage. Corn silage is chopped after burndown results indicate whole-plant moisture is in the desired window to create a well-packed, quality pile for storage.

What techniques do you use to store, manage and feed your forages? Quality storage of forage in both instances includes the utilization of a good quality inoculant applied at the chopper and a meticulous job of blading thin layers and packing, packing and more packing. Minimizing oxygen is the key to any quality forage storage system. We cover our piles using an oxygen barrier film and plastic, a 2-piece system. This is followed by tire sidewalls, a tire-to-tire configuration with double-tired seams. We use a skid loader-mounted facer for silage removal for daily feeding and maintain a straight face for minimizing oxygen infiltration. We try to face only the amount needed for daily usage to optimize forage freshness.

How does quality forages play in the production goals for your herd? Forage quality plays very heavily into the annual production goals of our herd. Forage quality dictates what your production goals can really be. Since the bulk of our ration is comprised of homegrown forages, we rely on quality to obtain our goals. We prefer to minimize purchased feed inputs to try and keep our cost of production within reason.

What are management or harvesting techniques you have changed that have made a notable difference in forage quality? A management change that has made a noticeable change in forage quality has been the use of fungicide. Both corn silage and haylage crops have demonstrated a noticeable change when utilizing a fungicide. Keeping the plants healthy and disease-free or disease-suppressed has made a huge difference in the quality of the product in the pile. That is appreciated all year long.

Describe a challenge you overcame in reaching your forage quality goals. Using a custom harvester for chopping. Recognizing the relatively short harvest window you have in achieving top-quality forages, we recognized we didn’t have the labor and equipment resources to achieve our goals consistently. After making the change, we’ve had much more consistency in forage quality, and that makes for a much more profitable scenario all year long.