Increasing  silage quality

Silage, from a nutrition point of view, is a cornerstone that determines success or failure of any production system. While we might talk long about the quality of the concentrate or the cost of same, over 50 per cent of the diet will be silage and the best concentrate will struggle to achieve our goals if silage quality is poor.
While silage quality has improved somewhat over the last few years it is still below where we would like it to be, and we still have much work to do. In short, tradition is holding back progress and new rules and techniques need to be adopted to increase the quality. An analysis of 600 silages showed the average dry matter digestibility (DMD) on Irish farms being 68 per cent, but when you look at the lower levels achieved you have 58 per cent DMD, 15 per cent dry matter (DM) and 9 per cent protein, which would struggle to produce any production levels.
While a lot of the management features associated with silage production are set in stone, there are still others that we can adjust to suit the cause. For instance, delaying harvest date can affect DMD by 3.3 units per week, a lodging crop can affect it at the same level, whereas cutting to suit your sward heading date can affect DMD by as much as 7 DMD units. Can a plan be created to win some of these units back?
The losses in DM terms between the field and feed out can be invisible to the eye but can be eye watering once calculated. Research has shown up to 25 per cent losses in these areas, meaning if you cut 60 acres in the first cut then 15 acres will never be fed to the animals. This is caused by field losses and more importantly losses in the pit caused by poor ensiling techniques.
The use of silage additives/inoculants have long been debated and, in the absence of knowledge or experience of them, they are either excluded or added if we think the silage needs a helping hand. Silage additives cannot make poor silage good, but it can take the average 68 DMD in silage in Ireland to the next level. Get the silage in as quickly as possible, exclude the air and drop the pH (‘pickling’) as quickly as possible to reduce the losses; it is the latter that a silage additive helps with. What we know about silage additives now and their benefit should move them from ‘nice to have’ to ‘need to have’.
Doing some calculations on Alltech silage additive, Egalis, recently highlighted the importance of using an additive. Reducing the wasted DM losses in the pit by as little as 1.5 per cent and increasing the DMD of the silage by 1.5 per cent generating more milk/meat, resulted in a 10:1 return on investment by using a silage additive outside of the peace of mind of the silage being preserved well.