Over the past few years there has been a lot of excitement about potential gains in milk yield and herd health that might come from feeding long-chop maize silage to dairy cows. But is special equipment needed to produce this sort of product? Experimental work suggests maybe not.
The idea that maize, chopped into much longer lengths than normal and then more thoroughly broken up, would be more efficiently utilised by dairy cows started in the US around 2008. In Europe the notion is taking hold, too, so, if customers look to change their approach, contractors will have to think about how best to deliver the goods. Central to the American concept is a corn cracker whose rollers have a different design to conventional ribs, and which spin with more speed difference between them. Such equipment appears to work very well in typical US crops where the dry matter is high, but it does involve substantial investment. So it would be handy to know if a similar end result can be coaxed from a more conventional cracker, particularly in damper European crops.
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