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Monday, September 22, 2014

It's Choppin' Time...

The chalkboard in our kitchen has had, "It's choppin' time" written on it for the last few weeks.  We started with a couple custom jobs as our corn wasn't quite ready.  We've been getting about an inch of rain every week for the last several.  I'm not complaining as I know there are several places that are extremely dry.

Brad loves chopping time because it marks the beginning of harvest and I guess it helps me get in the flow of harvest time and delivering meals to the fields:)

The green John Deere tractor in the picture below is called the chopper.  It picks the corn and stalks and chops them up into tiny pieces and then blows all of it out the yellow spout right into the red and gray wagon...
Here's a video for a better visual...
The corn is picked when it is still fairly green, but not too green.  It can't be too dry because we want the silage to have some "juice" in it.





The pictures above were taken when we were chopping for a neighbor who has a dairy farm.  He fills a silage bag, like the four below, as well as two silos.  We only fill bags because that's what works best for us.  Three of these bags hold corn silage and the other is filled with haylage.  Both of which we will feed to our beef cattle and will hopefully last all year.
Here's a picture of our neighbor's silos...
 The silage is unloaded from the wagon into this "blower" and then goes up the long white tube to fill the silo.
We mix the corn silage with haylage, dry hay, corn and supplements (vitamins to keep them healthy, just like our vitamins) all together to make a yummy meal for the calves and they love it!






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