Harvest: Silage Bales

A 1950s British IH video for converting a baler for silage bales

Bailing for silage is done just one day after cutting instead of the normal 3-5 days for regular hay bales. Because the hay is much greener (and wetter), they are heavier. So the conversion kit contains a trip lever that halves the size of a bale. If this technique actually took off in Britain in the 20th century, it didn't in the USA.

However, silage bales are making a comeback. When you see a video of baling where the bales are then wrapped several times with plastic, those are silage bales. The plastic keeps the oxygen out. Note that you can't pick these bales up with the standard two-prong attachment on a skid or front loader because they would poke holes in the plastic wrapping. I wonder how much the cost of the plastic adds to the cost of a bale.

Photo courtesy of Josh Vrieze.
Josh Vrieze is the product manager at Vermeer Corporation. 

The motivation for this posting was the historical video above and this article about a special round baler made for baleage. It does mention that baleage started in Europe. It says you need five days of dry weather to make regular hay, but I remember my grandfather's farm in northeast Indiana needed only three. But even then it was tense sometimes to get a stretch of three dry days when the alfalfa was ready to cut. Remember, weather predictions were even worse in the 1960s than they are now.




Watch just the first few seconds of this video to see how a loader attachment grabs the bales instead of stabbing the bales.


I did find a big square bale scenario, but how do you seal the ends? Is stacking them close to each other good enough?

Screenshot of blowing into a big square baler with a wrapper attachment

Baleage does not need to be finely chopped. Bite-sized pieces (of a cow's mouth) of 2.5 to 4 inches long is small enough. Some big square balers come with knifes built in. (Now I can't find the video of a baler with a sharpening attachment built into the baler.)