Making excellent quality baled silage requires lots of planning. With factors like uncooperative weather, lack of materials, and a shortage of workers, the reality is baled silage could very well put a noticeable dent on your pocket. Therefore, it is crucial that the money you put into investing in it should return to you as soon as possible. You see, the chances of minimising the costs are high if you have a plan. Do not look at making baled silage as a salvage operation since that is where you most likely will fail.

In the planning process, you must understand and take the following factors into account:

• The amount of baled silage required and where it must come from
• The ideal time for harvesting
• How you plan on mowing, baling, and transporting the baled or wrapped silage
• The preferred method of storage
• The use of a silage wrap or other alternatives
• Where and when to feed it

Furthermore, you should know that wilting is a crucial component in the process of making baled silage. Accordingly, you need to be flexible enough in planning, especially about the weather since you need a sunny day for an ideal feed drying.

Baled silage differs in a few ways to that of a traditional clamp silage process. For instance, you incur the costs of baling, wrapping, as well as transport on a “per bale” basis. However, you do have to know that it is less likely for you to suffer from the repercussions of cutting high-quality but low-yielding crops. The truth is you may take full advantage of it since it encourages the conservation of high-quality grass. With excellent grass quality, you achieve better feeding value because of a highly digestible bale.

It likewise is equally important to come up with dense and well-shaped bales. The use of silage wrap helps a lot, but you do have to acknowledge that the reduced number of bales will decrease the costs of baling, wrapping, and transportation. The advantage of producing well-shaped bales is that you won’t have a difficult time wrapping them properly, plus they won’t incur significant damage and losses. In coming up with well-shaped bales, be sure you consider the following:

• It is best to present well-shaped swaths which are ideal for the baler pickup
• If you can, adjust the baler density setting to the maximum position allowed
• If possible, drive the tractor for coming up with a balanced flow of grass into the bale chamber

Finally, we strongly recommend that you take advantage of a slow instead of a fast tractor speed. The reason is that you want to come up with a dense and well-packed bale.