With the increasing costs in concentrate the importance in producing ensilage with a high quality is becoming more and more important. To succeed with this goal it is of importance not only to harvest in the right period, but also to be able to store the ensilage without a decrease in quality and nutrional values. To maintain a good ensilage the covering of the ensilage must be carefully made. An unsuccessful covering causes mould to grow in the ensilage, which both increases the work load and also increases the amount of feed which is wasted. A bigger amount of spoiled feed also increases the risk of feeding spoiled feed to the cattle.
Both the nutritional and hygienic quality is crucial to a high milk yield and a good health in your stock. If the silage process is unsuccessful you may have to use this feed during the whole season, just because you don’t have anything else to use for silage. These are the reasons why you must be very careful when you cover the ensilage, to avoid this.
With this paper I wanted to find out which qualities that are most important in a silo plastic for the covering of the ensilage, and which covering method you should use to minimize the risk for an untight storage.
To find these things out I made 48 phone interviews with farmers with a bunker silo. In these interviews I made an evaluation for Lantmännen economic association
regarding their silo plastic called “Triosun”, and complemented this with questions in how they covered their silos and what they used to weigh down the silo plastic with.
My conclusion are that most farmers are pleased with Lantmännens silo plastic “Triosun” and especially its elasticity. Most farmers considered that you sh...
