Dave Davies from Silage Solutions Ltd gave a very interesting talk at the recent Teagasc open day on the Kepak finishing farm in Co Meath.

Dave has 20 years’ experience as a research scientist at IGER in Aberystwyth in Wales, and works with farmers to make sure the best possible grass silage, while maize silage is made on an annual basis. He gave the attending farmers some good advice on making top-quality silage and preventing losses during the different stages.

He explained that the ideal dry matter (DM) for silage is around 30% DM and his advice was that this should be achieved by wilting rapidly for a period of a maximum of 24-36 hours.

“Grass should be layered at 15cm depth with side sheets used along with a cling film barrier and a top sheet,” he said.

“There should be pressure all over the clamp using silage mats or other similar weights with a special focus needed with gravel bags along the walls where effective rolling is sometimes difficult.”

The aim is to seal in carbon dioxide to create anaerobic fermentation with the most important point to prevent any oxygen from entering the pit. It’s a similar story with bales with puncturing allowing oxygen in and disrupting proper fermentation.

Dave also highlighted the point that clamps can have as high as 25% losses between mowing and feeding out with baled silage having lower losses at 10%.

Inoculants

He had some interesting comments on the use of silage inoculants and their use under Irish conditions.

Dave said: “Most silage inoculants are wrong for Irish conditions due to – generally – Irish farms making lower DM silages than most parts of the world.

“Under these conditions you need an inoculant with 1,000,000 homofermentative bacteria applied/g of grass.

“These products are very beneficial under Irish conditions, especially on silage destined to be fed to lactating dairy cows. The main homofermentative bacteria are L plantarum and Pediococcus,” he said. “The main ones to avoid are L buchneri, L brevis, L hilgardii and L kefira.”