How to get more from your maize silage

After a difficult growing season, you may be faced with one or more challenges for your maize silage: 

We’re here to help you make the most of the maize you’ve grown and produce as much milk as possible from your silage. 

Five key steps to preserve quality in your maize silage, from harvest to feed-out: 

1. Ensile correctly

When the plant reaches an average dry matter (DM) of 30-35% it’s ready for harvesting. Use the milk line on the kernel, and the leaves at the base of the plant as a guide. Consider the maize variety when looking at the leaves – stay-green varieties will do exactly that! 

2. Create a barrier

3. Use an inoculant

Using a maize-specific inoculant, such as MAGNIVA Platinum Maize, will optimise fermentation and help maintain stability throughout storage and feed-out. This results in less heating, less energy loss and therefore increased feed value for your cows.  

Estimates show the cost of treating a 1,000-tonne clamp is the equivalent to the cost of growing 43 tonnes. This would be 4% of the total amount of silage, equating to less than a 10cm strip across a typical 2.2m x 50m x 100m clamp. 

4. Keep an eye on the clamp

5. Avoid losses at feeding

At feed-out, best practice is to remove one metre per week, crossing the entire face, to keep up with oxygen influx into the silage. 

Where getting across the face takes longer, taking half-shear grab depths will result in a more consistent feed. 

How maize inoculant helps you meet seasonal challenges

1. Later harvest risk of mycotoxins

The longer plants are in the soil, the greater their mould load, especially in a wet season.  Late-harvested maize also carries more yeasts. Moulds produce mycotoxins when stressed and yeasts create aerobic instability, unless silage fermentation is excellent. Mycotoxins matter, because they can have negative impacts on animal health, production and fertility. Aerobic instability is a sign of spoilage microbes consuming valuable nutrients that could be utilised for milk production.   Using Lallemand’s MAGNIVA Platinum Maize silage inoculant has been proven to reduce yeasts and moulds in silage by 99.9%, Microbiology Open, Volume 10, Issue 1 . It does this by reducing mould growth and keeping yeasts under control, as well as improving aerobic stability and energy retention. 

2. Tight forage stocks and early clamp opening 

Opening clamps early also brings an increased risk of aerobic instability. Using MAGNIVA Platinum maize silage inoculant has been proven to increase aerobic stability, enabling safe clamp opening after just 14 days (J Anim Sci. 2020 Oct 1; 98(10)) Effects of inoculation of corn silage with Lactobacillus hilgardii and Lactobacillus buchneri on silage quality, aerobic stability, nutrient digestibility, and growth performance of growing beef cattle | Journal of Animal Science | Oxford Academic . We do not recommend opening clamps earlier than 14 days after ensiling, whatever inoculant you use, due to the risk of silo gases.  

Find out more about early clamp opening here.

3. Earlier harvest due to stressed plants

Here the crop will have more simple sugars available that have not been converted to starch. This increases the risk of a poor initial fermentation. When the initial part of the fermentation goes badly, more dry matter (DM) is lost during ensiling. Losses increase further once the silage clamp is opened, due to poor stability. Poorly fermented maize silage can impact farm profitability, with up to  20% DM loss recorded in untreated maize silage .  

Using a crop- and condition-specific inoculant, such as Magniva Platinum Maize, can help prevent this problem and retain dry matter. (Forage Centre of Excellence, Miner Institute (unpublished).