Through the years, farmers have devised any number of methods to estimate the moisture of cut forage in an attempt to hit the optimum harvest mark...

As we rocket past the middle of July and become entrenched in the dog days of summer, let’s not forget that the second forage seeding season will soon commence. Some planning is in order. Alt...

“Mike, you need to come down here. I’d like to talk to you,” related the voice over my office phone in late April. I would soon learn that voice belonged to Willie Foster, a man who has a...

A truckload of hay is 48,000 pounds, a “small” 250-ton silo bag and a 1,000-ton pile or bunker are 500,000 and 2,000,000 pounds, respectively...

With lower milk and beef prices coupled with increasing corn seed prices, there is good reason to contemplate the optimum planting rate for silage corn. Recently, researchers in both Virginia and Wisconsin weighed in on the topic. Gonzalo Ferreira, extension dairy scientist at Virginia Tech, reported on the second year of planting rate study in the Dairy Pipeline newsletter. In 2015, silage corn was planted in four southern Virginia plots at rates of 22,000 to...

The author is a forage consultant in Bay City, Wis. Several years into my forage career I encountered a high-producing, well-managed herd struggling with managing forage piles. It wasn’t...

Adequately processed kernels separated from the stover and leaves using the float test. The title might fool you into thinking we’re discussing NFL stats, but the focus is actually a topic with...

Forage is an indispensable part of dairy cow diets. However, due to its bulkiness and the inherently low levels of fiber digestibility, cows are limited in how much forage they can consume...

In my many years spent as a county extension agronomist in one of the largest dairy counties in Wisconsin, I heard a lot of reasons to grow brown midrib (BMR) corn and a lot of reasons not to...

A number of years ago one of my kids came home with their report card and presented it to me. Embedded alongside the list of class names and numbers were a few B’s and a couple of C’s...