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Heat is drying down MN silage corn quickly

A farmer in southern Minnesota says heat is drying silage corn fast as harvest winds down.

Nate Hultgren, who farms near Raymond, has been chopping silage for a local dairy and he says other dairies in the area have stopped because the moisture content is too low to make good quality feed.

“A lot of them were short of their target of tons they wanted to harvest,” he says. “The corn at our farm has held on long enough we should get good quality moisture in the piles, but it’s amazing when we get 100-degree heat and wind how fast corn dries.”

Hultgren says the ideal moisture for corn silage is 65%, which he says is the peak of digestibility for cows, and other dairies are harvesting corn in the mid-50% moisture which means…

“It’s hard to pack it into a pile. That’s part of the problem and the other part is a lack of fermentation in the silage pile that makes the feed quality good.”

Hultgren says his farm started chopping silage one week earlier than usual to capture what was needed and everything should get harvested.