Feed for cows from field to trough

Sergey Viktorovich Galkin, the mentor of the Children's Farmer's School on the AGRO XXI portal, talks about what fodder is for cows and what misconceptions are associated with this term.

Now, with the advent of the Internet, everything seems to have become clearer, forage is a prepared feed and not only for cows, but also for any agricultural livestock.

it is already clear to some that forage for cattle is not only grain, but also canned grass. But most of our farmers are still not aware that it is grass, and not grain at all, that is the main feed. Here, as they say, the master is the master. That is, it turns out that most, or at least most of our constantly record grain yields, should go to feed our living creatures.

And this path, from the field to the feeder, for our fodder grain is complex, long, and most importantly, expensive.

For starters, grain is harvested and partially cleaned with expensive combine harvesters. Then they are taken, often hundreds of miles away, to elevators, where they are finally cleaned and dried.

Then, the cleaned grain is taken to feed mills, where, in order to save money for the plant, it is mixed with what was previously cleaned, with husks, straw particles, weed seeds and other grain cleaning waste, all kinds of BMVD are added in accordance with scientific recommendations.

Moreover, it is worth noting that in all my agricultural life, I have never met compound feed, where the composition of the ingredients written-declared would coincide with the real composition. Of course, for sure, there is such compound feed somewhere, but I have not met it yet. And then, compound feed from factories for the same hundreds of miles is transported to farms.

But in many agriculturally developed countries, this process is greatly simplified.

If you really want to feed with grain, then it is better to remove it not in full, but in the phase of milky-wax ripeness, when the grain contains a maximum of nutrients. In addition, it allows you to start cleaning 1-2 weeks earlier. And in this case, the maximum cleaning of the grain during threshing is not required at all, and the transportation of grain to the elevators is not required at all, and one of the most expensive operations, drying, is not required at all.

There are quite simple, respectively quite inexpensive, and mobile machines driven by a tractor PTO, which flatten grain in milky-wax ripeness and pack it in PVC sleeves, which can be located either directly in the field, or at the place of consumption - at the farm, which allows to manage practically without expensive transportation, and the lack of transport often simply paralyzes the EXPORT of already harvested grain from under the combines.

Moreover, the flattening of grain requires several times less energy than crushing, and the flattened grain is eaten and digested better than crushed, and with much lower losses during feeding.

In addition, grains for fodder, in the phase of milky-wax ripeness, can be remarkably harvested even without expensive combine harvesters - elementary inexpensive trailed mowers-choppers, trailed forage harvesters or even simple mowers with further selection of green mass by a trailer-picker-chopper.

Such a green mass of cereals, containing grain in milky-wax ripeness, can also be packed into PVC bags of various capacities for large livestock, and pressed into rolls with film packaging for smaller farms or for sale.

Both sleeves and rolls can be stored both on the field and at the farm, that is, significantly gaining on logistics. At the same time, the grain losses that we have with classical combining are practically reduced to nothing, that is, we get almost the entire biological grain yield, which is usually 1.5 times more than the harvest in the combine bunker.

As a result, we get fresh green food with an energy value of up to 0.8 c.u. with a full set of nutrients like in summer greens, which can be stored in a package for up to 3 years without significant loss of quality, which allows you to create carry-over stocks of highly nutritious food in case of weather disasters.

As long-term practice shows, neither traditional hay, nor even more so our traditional silage, can definitely survive three years of storage, God forbid they hold out until spring.