Forage Profile: Justin Hamus

Describe your farm and facilities. We are a family farm operated by my wife, Stevie, and me with two part-time workers. We milk 165 cows in a double-10 parabone parlor and house them in free stalls. We raise all our replacements. We farm 410 acres and raise all our own forages.

What forages do you harvest? We harvest corn silage and haylage.

How many acres of crops do you raise? We crop 410 acres. We do about 250 acres of corn for silage and high moisture corn, and the rest is either new seeding or established alfalfa. Everything we grow is for feeding the cows.

Describe the rations for your livestock. We feed a 1-group total mixed ration; we aim for roughly 50% corn silage and 50% haylage.

What quality and quantity do you harvest of each crop? To get enough feed for the entire year, we shoot for around 2,300 tons of corn silage and 2,100 tons of haylage. We want the best quality we can possibly get. Without good feed, it is hard to get the cows to do well.

Describe your harvesting techniques for alfalfa and corn silage. For alfalfa, we typically try to cut at 28- to 30-day intervals. We mow with a 13-foot discbine and merge it, usually a day or two later. We try to harvest between 60% and 65% moisture for haylage; that seems to feed the best out of the bags. We have a Claas chopper for corn silage. In a perfect world, we like to make our corn silage between 65% and 70% moisture. I think we will be starting to chop corn this week, as soon as the fields dry out from the rain we just got (Sept. 4).

What techniques do you use to store, manage and feed your forages? We store our feed in bags. We have an asphalt pad that we can put 10 bags on and a granite road base area to put five more on. I think it is important to use an inoculant. I have been experimenting with a couple of different ones lately; I have tried one that works with Lactobacillus and now am going to try one that fights oxygen. I feel like it is pretty important to use some kind of preservative. Putting up feed at a good moisture, between that 60% and 70% level, gets good packing and fermentation.

How does quality forages play in the production goals for your herd? You have to have quality forage. It is pretty much the difference between 80 and 90 pounds of milk per cow. If you do not have good forages, you are not going to reach your goals. Really good forages will get you over 90 pounds per cow, but if you just have average forages, it is really hard to get over 80 pounds. In my experience, that 10 pounds per cow really is the difference. My goal is to have my haylage between 20% and 23% protein. With corn silage, I shoot for starch levels between 35% and 40%.

What are management or harvesting techniques you have changed that has made a notable difference in forage quality? For me, I think it was going back to bags. We tried piles for a while and went back to bags. I think that made me appreciate using bags, really. I have less feed loss and feel like more forage is better in bags, and my production follows that. The bags also allow me to be able to separate different crops.

Describe a challenge you overcame in reaching your forage quality goals. I have been seeding in more alfalfa and getting away from grass. The cows milk better on straight alfalfa. I try to feed grassier stuff to my heifers and alfalfa to the cows. We struggled with making the piles, too, when we tried those. We could never get it done fast enough; it would get too dry on us. It was more labor-intensive, both making the pile and feeding off it. It took me more time to manage the piles, moving sidewalls, cutting plastic, facing — it took a lot of time before I could get to actually mixing and feeding cows.