When walking a feedbunk filled with a total mixed ration (TMR) containing some haylage, it’s pretty easy to spot haylage chunks that didn’t get broken up and mixed. These chunks stick out like a pink sheep in a white sheep herd.

This likely resonates with your farm if you’ve fed a ration with any amount of haylage in it, though this month’s column isn’t exclusively centered upon haylage chunks in the feedbunk. Instead, I’m aiming to help your farm think through and smooth out other areas in your forage management and feeding plan.

Forage contributes nutrients, energy, structural fiber, and moisture to the ration. The moisture and sticky nature of some forages can contribute to overall ration consistency by holding the many ingredients together and preventing sorting. At the same time, forage often contributes inconsistency to the ration through unrecognized variation in nutrients, energy, and feed hygiene characteristics. Bag silos are the most likely to deviate in quality day to day; however, my experience over the past five years with much larger silage bunker and pile silos has uncovered opportunities to improve by addressing issues that are rooted in nutrients and feed hygiene inconsistencies.

Daily feedout

These opportunities can be found by addressing two general time frames when we manage forage, either within one day’s feeding or in the forage that is fed out day to day. The daily defacing and feed mixing strategies will differ dramatically from one farm to the next. However, our goal should be to present a uniform forage feed ingredient into the first and last batches of mixed feed.

It can be easier to visualize field or crop driven variation in grass or alfalfa haylage within the bunker, pile, or pit. In some cases, we can analyze moisture or nutrient content for left, center-bottom, center-top, and right samples to showcase meaningful variation that should be smoothed out. Whether we take this step or not, it’s often a great idea to deface the forage and pre-mix it to some extent. This can be done by pushing the feed into a center pile and mixing it with a skid steer or payloader bucket prior to the day’s feeding.

Some farms go further, blending feed in a mixer and unloading a consistent forage for later feeding. This latter, more intensive step makes even more sense for farms feeding out of bags, and we can feed from multiple bags to help smooth out the bumps in forage quality or moisture as well. Don’t assume corn silage is consistent either, as the left-to- right variation in many bunkers should also be smoothed out to some extent.

Weekly checks

Shifting gears to day-to-day variation, many farms monitor moisture one to several times per week. If your farm is feeding several hundred or more cows, I’d suggest setting up a protocol to monitor moisture two to three times per week. Then, use a rolling average to manage moisture and dry matter adjustments. Don’t assume that moisture and nutritional quality changes trend together.

Historically, I’d use moisture as a canary in a coal mine to forecast nutritional changes. But over the past five years, I’ve experienced time and time again where starch in corn silage or protein in haylage change dramatically in the absence of any moisture deviation in that same time frame. This has been a strong talking point among colleagues, as we’ve been struck by how frequently feed energy or nutritional value change when sampling feeds one or more times per week. Our prior experience and assumptions — based upon monthly forage testing protocols or reacting to herd performance changes — are seemingly obsolete in light of these new, faster paced experiences.

Forage can also contribute some farm speed bumps by way of fermentation irregularities or feed hygiene flare-ups. Try as we might to manage fermentation, my recent experiences with many growers proves that Mother Nature still drives a majority of the silage or haylage fermentation outcomes that we experience.

The initial goal with ensiling forages is to pack and seal up a forage crop that has suitable sugar content to feed the fermentation bacteria. Many different factors such as less than ideal sugar content or higher ash content, which are often beyond our control, can create more challenging fermentation conditions. These situations often come about following an unexpected rain giving the wilting forage a soak. If possible, manage these rained-on acres separately from the rest of the crop.

If substandard fermentation prevails across the entire crop, ramp up efforts to monitor inconsistency in fermentation as it’s fed out. We can do this with moisture, temperature, or fermentation assessments, but don’t assume the crop will ensile similarly. I’ve found the inconsistency in this forage to be equally as challenging as the forage with substandard fermentation. In a lot of cases, I think the nutrition program can be improved by managing inconsistencies found within the less-than-ideal forage.

Strive for clean feed

Lastly, feed hygiene issues such as undesirable fungi, bacteria, or other contaminants can bring about major inconsistencies in animal health and performance. This last topic should be its own column.

I’ll reiterate what I’ve learned from mycotoxin expert Lon Whitlow — step up your monitoring efforts and do not assume the contaminants are evenly dispersed across your forage. There are hot spots in feed hygiene cases, which can sometimes be managed without necessarily spending big money on expensive feed additives. Think of these like finding the haylage chunks in a TMR. Sometimes they’re indicative of a larger issue, but other times they are not.

Keep these different areas in mind as your farm continues to pursue greater consistency in forage production, management, and feeding. Dairy and beef cattle thrive on consistent feed, and there are likely ever-present opportunities to secure that on your operation.

This article appeared in the August/September 2025 issue of Hay & Forage Grower on page 26.

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