Forage Profile: Perry, Chris and Gary Beranek

Describe your farm and facilities. We milk in a double-8 parallel parlor, and our cows are housed in a 100-by-212-foot sand-bedded freestall barn. It is a tunnel-ventilated barn with a dozen 72-inch fans and two 55-inch fans.

What forages do you harvest? We harvest both alfalfa and corn silage.

How many acres of crops do you raise? We do 300 acres of crops. We have 100 acres of alfalfa and chop 75-80 acres of corn silage. The rest of the acres are grain corn.

Describe the rations for your livestock. On a dry matter basis our ration consists of 15 pounds of corn silage and 10 pounds of baleage, with the rest being cottonseed, a grain mix and a protein and mineral balancer.

What quality and quantity do you harvest of each crop? The moisture for the baleage we wrap is 45%-50%. We try to cut every 28 days, depending on the weather outlook. We try to harvest our corn silage at 65%-68% moisture. We store that in silage bags.

Describe your harvesting techniques for alfalfa and corn silage. The alfalfa is cut by a custom guy who uses a self-propelled discbine. Then we double rake the windrows. We harvest the hay with a McHale baler with knives in it. We have found that the McHale baler makes a more compact bale and it saves a lot of time when we dump it in the vertical total mixed ration mixer. We chop our own silage with a self-propelled John Deere 7500 6-row chopper. We have been growing Dairyland Seed HiDF corn silage for the past six years. We have found that it yields well and is easier to feed to the cows. The digestibility has been really good on it.

What techniques do you use to store, manage and feed your forages? We tube wrap our baleage, and everything goes through the mixer.
We feed just over two bales a day of baleage. The bales peel apart pretty easily, which allows us to feed partial bales. We feed 8,000 pounds of corn silage and 4,800 pounds of baleage a day.

How do quality forages play in the production goals for your herd? It is important. High-quality haylage can save money on protein purchases. The HiDF corn silage feeds nicely and has helped us with milk production.

What management or harvesting techniques have you changed that made a notable difference in forage quality? The year we started using the McHale round baler, it produced a denser, more uniform bale, and we ended up with less spoilage. Seven years ago, we hired a different person to do our chopping, and that has allowed us to get the silage off in a timelier fashion. That helped us take our corn silage at a moisture level that we desired. Last year, we bought that chopper from him.

Describe a challenge you overcame in reaching your forage quality goals. We used to buy our alfalfa, and we now grow our own. We have done that for five years, and it has put us more in control of the quality we want. Switching from dry hay to wet hay helped with the palatability of the ration by having more moisture in the bale.