Drought-Stricken Corn Silage Feeding Needs Supplementation
BY
DR. GEORGE F.W. HAENLEIN
Extension Dairy Specialist
University of Delaware
NEWARK, Del. As if we didn’t
have enough problems already
with surplus milk, buyout farm
losses and reduced milk prices,
along comes a one-in-a-hundred
years drought in much of this area.
Some corn was already stunted
and very uneven before tasseling.
Because of the drought, some of us
are stuck with some sorry looking
com with sorry looking ears for
filling our silos.
Fortunately, cows have a
wonderful buffer system in their
large rumen. They can adapt and
keep going for some time on
borderline feeds, although they
may reduce their milk output in
the process. But dairy farmers
who need to make money to pay
their mortgages can’t afford to let
this happen by including too much
of such feeds in their daily milking
cow ration. And drought-stricken
com is a borderline feed.
For one thing, it’s a low yielder
in tons per acre, so you need more
acres to fill your silo. Our
University of Delaware dairy
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strategy is to have enough silage
on hand year-round for 12 months.
This contrasts with other practices
before my time here and certainly
differs from the practices on many
dairy farms in this region. So, did
we plant enough acres this year to
fill our silos, even under drought
conditions? Or do we need to plant
double-crop to extend our acreage
to keep silos full-maybe with
small grains plus vetch or millet
and soybeans off-season for ad
ditional silage?
Because of poor ear set, drought
stricken com is also a low yielder
in terms of energy content per
pound of silage eventually fed to
our cows. In this sense, it com
pares more to sweet com after ear
harvest, which can be fed as silage
but must be supplemented with
more energy from concentrate
supplements to keep milk
production levels high.
Drought-stricken corn may be
harvested too dry, which poses
other problems. When this hap
pens, it doesn’t pack well, leaving
trapped air to cause heating and
molding instead of prpper fer
mentation. The resulting silage
may end up on your manure
spreader instead of in the feed
bunk. Wasted work, wasted feed,
wasted money!
In borderline cases, such silage
will at least heat up with so-called
secondary fermentation in the feed
trough. The result—reduced
palatability, less feed intake, lower
digestibility and less milk output.
To save this borderline feed,
drought-stricken com that’s too
dry can be watered down with a
hose during ensiling.
The optimum moisture content
of com for silage harvest is around
65 percent. You can easily check
for this by weighing a handful of
chopped com before putting it into
your microwave oven or on top of
your tractor exhaust pipe, and then
carefully weighing it again after
drying, maybe 10 minutes. The
percentage difference in weights
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gives you the moisture content. .
Supplementary off-season
silages from small grains need to
be wilted down to the 50 percent to
60 percent moisture -range for
optimum fermentation. Com that’s
harvested too early can also be too
wet, in which case it will make
inferior silage, producing very
undesirable foul smelling seepage
and nutrient losses.
One final thing to beware of in
drought-stricken com. It may be
high in nitrates because of
inhibited plant growth and
inhibited utilization of nitrogen
fertilizers.
Nitrates, if not in high levels, can
be utilized by cows for protein
synthesis by rumen
microorganisms but drought
stricken com may have levels that
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are too high and toxic. Silage
fermentation will reduce nitrate
contents because of the generation
of nitrous oxide gases that
dissipate - from tower silos;
however, much less from
horizontal silos. A silage analysis
for nitrate contents after silo
opening of drought stricken com is
a must so as to know howjWtfch of
that borderline feed can ne safely
fed, probably only after diluting it
with other feeds, hays, haylage,
green chop and concentrates to
reduce daily nitrate intake per cow
down to safe levels.
Thus, after evaluating the
conditions of drought stricken corn
and considering that it is only a
more or less borderline feed, it can
be fed to dairy cows to get through
these hard times.
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