Forage Profile: Casey Pfaff of Alma Center, Wisconsin | 220 cows

Describe your farm and facilities. We milk in an 80-cow tiestall barn and switch 40-50 more that are housed in a pack barn at the home farm and a 98-cow tiestall barn at another farm right down the road. The calves are raised in hutches and then transitioned to pack pens until they are pregnant, when they move to pasture or free stalls.

What forages do you harvest? We harvest alfalfa haylage and corn silage; new seeding alfalfa is planted with peas and triticale.

How many acres of crops do you raise? We usually have 180 acres of alfalfa and 40-50 acres of new seeding. We also raise 450 acres of corn and 350 acres of soybeans.

Describe the rations for your livestock. Our ration consists of a high-forage diet (60%) of haylage and corn silage with high-moisture corn and a protein and mineral mix.

What quality and quantity do you harvest of each crop? We like to cut alfalfa in a mid-bud stage and try to harvest silage at 67%-69% moisture.

Describe your harvesting techniques for alfalfa and corn silage. All silage is stored in bunkers. Alfalfa is cut with a discbine, racked with a triple rotor Krone rake, chopped and hauled with trucks. Corn is chopped and hauled with trucks as well.

What techniques do you use to store, manage and feed your forages? We use bunkers to store all our forages. The bunkers are covered with an oxygen barrier and plastic with tires on top.

How does quality forages play in the production goals for your herd? We strive to put up the highest quality silage so we can feed a higher forage diet without giving up too much milk.

What are management or harvesting techniques you have changed that have made a notable difference in forage quality? We have tried low-lignin alfalfa in the past and started to spray our hay with a nitrogen-fixing agent called N-Physis that increased the protein content and quality. We have since gone away from low lignin because of this. On the corn silage part, we spray fungicide on it, which has, in return, produced a much healthier and consistent silage.

Describe a challenge you overcame in reaching your forage quality goals. A challenge we have overcome in our haylage would be changing our fertilizer program over the years, which improved some of the mineral values in our forage. We have used an oxygen barrier on our bunkers for many years, but before that, there was a layer on top that you could see was not as good in quality. The oxygen barrier is a must, in our opinion.