What's Up with Those Blue Things?

 

When people find out where my farm is and which one it is they generally say “Oh, you’re the one with all the silos.”

In the past we’ve been accused of being “rich” because we have the silos. As if the blue tubes held money or something. It was almost like we were doing something wrong because we had them.

We chose the Harvestore silos to store our feed because we thought it worked well for us.

Anyway, this picture shows all of our Harvestores (14) and our cement silos (3).

I thought I would help you understand what those represent.

 

The first thing is feed storage. These silos hold haylage, cornlage, and shelled corn. They do not hold manure like a local newspaper reported.

This is a breakdown of the silos and capacities:

Size of silo	Feed Stored	Wet wt. in tons	Dry matter in tons	Number
20 X 60	Haylage/Cornlage	Haylage -240 Cornlage -280	Haylage -280 Cornlage - 125	2
25 X 90	Haylage/Cornlage	Haylage - 695 Cornlage -760	Haylage aylage - 385 Cornlage -340	2
25 X 110	Haylage/Cornlage	Haylage - 895 Cornlage -955	Haylage - 490 Cornlage -430	3
Size of silo	Feed Stored	Weight
20 X 80	Corn	545 tons		7

 

I did some very unscientific mathematics. If all the silos were full of the same type (wet matter or dry matter) the weight would average 13,384 tons of wet matter and 7,175 tons of dry matter.

Every ounce of that food was “handled” by us one way or another. By handling, this is what I mean.

We will start at harvest, forget the planting aspect. Each field was mown (alfalfa), and chopped (alfalfa and cornlage) or shelled (corn). The feed was blown into a wagon or dumped into a grain cart. The wagons and carts were driven to the Harvestor silos and the feed was blown up the silo. All 13,000 tons.

Now, let’s add the Ag bags to the mix. We do not have enough silos to hold all the feed we need for our BEBs so we are now using Ag bags.

An Ag bag measures 12 ft. X 300 ft. We store cornlage and haylage in the bags. The capacity of the bag is 2 tons per foot. We figure 270 of the 300 ft. hold feed while the other 30 feet is gathered up when closed. If my math is correct then each Ag bag holds 540 tons of feed. We had 6 or 7 bags last year.

It comes down to this – what you think you see – blue silos = $$$ isn’t always what it actually is. For us blue silos = a whole lot of work and feed for the BEBs.