If you haven’t previously heard of ‘shredlage’, prepare to be educated. Used in making maize silage, shredlage is reckoned to combine the advantages of intensive crop processing while retaining sufficient fibre content to maintain rumen health. Here is Claas’s take on the technology
Benefits of shredlage include the starch being readily available from the smashed kernels, and coarser stalk material stimulating rumen activity. Not surprising, then, that for over five years North American feed consultants Roger Olsen and Ross Dale, along with engineer Bob Scherer, have been experimenting with shredlage-type corn crackers in forage harvesters.
Studies on the advantages of this type of crop processing carried out among American dairy farmers have produced promising and interesting results, especially as maize is such a key ingredient in US feed rations. This is largely why Claas bought the licence to market the technology under the patentedShredlage brand. If any maize silage is processed by a similar type of cracker it needs to be called ‘long chop’.
Claas currently offers three different types of these ‘long chop’ or Shredlage crackers:
■■ MCC M roller cracker with 80/100 teeth or MCC L roller cracker with 100/125 teeth, both with 30% speed differential
■■ MCC Shredlage cracker with 110/145 teeth a 50% speed differential and new spiral helical groove — the unit bought from the US
■■ A new, in-house developed cracker — the MCC Max. This comprises two rollers, each made up of 15 larger diameter (264mm) and 15 smaller (226mm) interlocking rings that spin at a speed differential of 30%.
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