Forage Profile: Tim and Jake Aho

Describe your farm and facilities. I farm here with my wife, Sarah, and six of our 10 kids, five of whom are at home yet. Carter and Jacqueline are the main milkers. Jake usually feeds calves and scrapes the barn. Tim does the feeding and the breeding. We milk 200 cows in a swing-10 parlor. The cows are housed in a freestall barn with mattresses we bed with sawdust. We raise our own heifers. Jake is the main guy in the field and does the planting on our farm and at the farm of my brother-in-law, Andrew Ingvalson. We built a 50-by-152 heifer barn for animals 2-3 months up to 13-14 months two years ago. The older animals also have access to a dirt lot. We A.I. and have an Angus bull for cleanup for our heifers.

What forages do you harvest? We do baleage, hay and corn silage. We also do peas and oats with our new seeding alfalfa. We try to take it in the boot stage, but that’s a short window. Otherwise, we let it head out.

How many acres of crops do you raise? We have 325 acres of corn, 200 acres of alfalfa and 95 acres of soybeans.

Describe the rations for your livestock. Our rations consist of baleage, silage, high moisture corn, canola meal, distillers and a custom mix. We mix twice a day for our milking herd.

What quality and quantity do you harvest of each crop? We try get our baleage around 160 relative feed quality and usually we cut every 30 days, but it depends on the weather. We try to get it up without rain. Our goal is to make four cuttings, with the first one starting in late May. We try not to cut after Sept. 1 unless we know we are going to plow the field up.

Describe your harvesting techniques for alfalfa and corn silage. For alfalfa, we do baleage on everything. We dry bale the meadows with a round baler. Our corn silage goal is to get it down to 70% moisture. We make a drive over pile and usually chop 200 acres. We have five dairies we work with for harvesting. It allows us to get a pile started and finished faster. We chop with one or two choppers and have up to eight guys who haul with trucks and wagons, and we have two push tractors that also pack it. We can get a lot done on a good day.

What techniques do you use to store, manage and feed your forages? We put our high moisture corn in bags, store the corn silage in drive-over piles and then do baleage. We start our animals on a total mixed ration at three months. We mix five batches. We do two batches for the cows, one for the older heifers, one for the younger heifers and one for the dry cows. The younger animals get a little better hay in their ration.

How does quality forages play in the production goals for your herd? It is very important. Our cows won’t milk well if they don’t have good quality hay or silage.

What are management or harvesting techniques you have changed that has made a notable difference in forage quality? We have been doing it for several years now, but since we started chopping together, we have been able to get the pile done in a day and can cover them right away; then, it doesn’t sit open too long. For our baleage we use a rotary rake to put two rows together. We also bought a tedder a couple of years ago, and that has helped when we need it. If the hay gets rained on or if we need to get it up faster, we use it. We have a kernel processor on our chopper and have for many years. We chop corn silage at a ¾-inch particle size, and that has helped it pack better.

Describe a challenge you overcame in reaching your forage quality goals. The biggest challenge is the weather, but I don’t know how you overcome that. We try to keep our equipment in good shape so we can go when we want to.