Producers Discuss Bird-Damaged Silage Bags
GREEN BAY, Wis. A recent discussion on the
Kansas State Silage-L Internet site highlighted sev-
eral possible solutions to the problems caused by
bird damage to silage bags.
The first comments on bird damaged silage bags
came from Thunder Bay, Ontario, The producer
noted, “We’ve recently had a lot of bird damage on
some bags filled with alfalfa silage. The bags had no
holes for several months, and in the last two days it
has been quite bad. Today, I placed a radio out on
the pad playing a talk station. Will this help?’’
The first producer to respond sent a picture of
how they handle the problem of bird damage. They
note, “on top of the bags we use paper stripes or
even a net to repel the birds.” In the picture there
were bales of hay on top of the bags with a post
driven through it. The netting is then placed on top
of the bales, and hooked on to the posts. The bales
appear to be approximately 10 feet apart.
Other producers wrote in comments, each with
their own solution, noting that no solution seemed
to be fool proof. Several suggested placing a wire
running lengthwise along the bag. Some noted that
this seemed to help somewhat with birds, but not
with other varmint such as rodents, deer, cats, or
dogs. Most noted that the radio would soon lose its
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effectiveness as the birds became accustomed to the
noise.
Joe Shefchik, spokesperson for the Crop Storage
Institute, notes “This is a widespread problem with
no clear solution at this time. While almost every
one has a suggestion on how to limit the damage, it
is still a very real risk of storing forage in silage
bags. The effects of this problem in terms of quality
and dry matter losses are very difficult to measure.
There is only one bag that I am aware of that was
tested for dry matter losses after it suffered bird
damage. This bag was at the University of Wiscon
sin where they found losses exceeding 30 percent.”
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