6 ms·

for which crop? most of the leftover biomass is used in typical crops. For corn, the stalks are used as silage. For wheat, the stalks are used to make straw.

weberc2 8y ago
> For corn, the stalks are used as silage. How common is this? In my area, the combines chew up the stalks and spit them out as chaff. I don't see many people collecting the chaff.
- Maximus9000 8y ago
  Not sure. The dairy farm I worked at used the corn stalks. They make a product called "silage" which can be used as winter feed for the cattle.
  - weberc2 8y ago
    Curious. My neighbor was a dairy farmer. They did this too. No one else though.
    - Juggerbot 8y ago
      It can depend on the price of fodder. If hay is cheap, there's not much incentive to spend time/fuel on baling stalks. However, if they're not baled, they decompose in the field, which technically reduces fertilizer inputs.
pohl 8y ago
I was under the impression that, in the case of corn at least, harvesting for silage or for grain was an either/or proposition. That is, if the crop is struggling and you don’t expect much yield as grain, then you might want to harvest it for silage to cut your losses. (I’m not a farmer, but I literally grew up in Podunk, Nebraska — a farm-adjacent village.)
thinkharder 8y ago
That's what is known as 'feed corn' and is grown specifically as livestock feed. The specific strains of corn are optimized for producing maximum plant material, which is mostly stalk and leaves. A field of feed corn plants will usually be very tall, 8-15 feet. In contrast a field of sweet corn (grown for human consumption and possibly for processing into other foods), will be much shorter, since it's optimized to produce the most, largest and highest sugar content corn kernels, and any energy the plant spends to grow a tall stalk is wasted. Feed corn is harvested with big combines that just cut down the whole plant at ground level and chop everything up. The results are piled up and left to ferment. Once fermented, you have silage. I'd be surprised to learn anyone was harvesting sweet corn and saving the waste material to make silage. The equipment isn't designed to keep that stuff it just gets dumped back onto the field. And those strains of corn don't produce very much plant material since they're optimized for small plants and big cobs. Additionally you'd have to load all the waste material into trucks, which would significantly raise the cost of harvesting. And dumping that stuff back onto the field is a good thing, it helps keep the dirt down for the winter and decomposes into usable nutrients and fibrous material which helps reduce compacting, etc. It'd be expensive and labor intensive to try to capture the waste material from feed corn. It's easier and more economical to just plant feed corn or buy silage. You're right about straw, though. The harvesters are specifically designed to leave the straw in row pile behind them. Then you run a baler over that and it leaves a row of straw bales in the field. Then you run a stacker over that (or a flatbed trailer and buck 'em by hand) and you have a haystack.

weberc2 8y ago

> For corn, the stalks are used as silage. How common is this? In my area, the combines chew up the stalks and spit them out as chaff. I don't see many people collecting the chaff.

Maximus9000 8y ago
Not sure. The dairy farm I worked at used the corn stalks. They make a product called "silage" which can be used as winter feed for the cattle.
- weberc2 8y ago
  Curious. My neighbor was a dairy farmer. They did this too. No one else though.
  - Juggerbot 8y ago
    It can depend on the price of fodder. If hay is cheap, there's not much incentive to spend time/fuel on baling stalks. However, if they're not baled, they decompose in the field, which technically reduces fertilizer inputs.

pohl 8y ago

I was under the impression that, in the case of corn at least, harvesting for silage or for grain was an either/or proposition. That is, if the crop is struggling and you don’t expect much yield as grain, then you might want to harvest it for silage to cut your losses. (I’m not a farmer, but I literally grew up in Podunk, Nebraska — a farm-adjacent village.)

thinkharder 8y ago

That's what is known as 'feed corn' and is grown specifically as livestock feed. The specific strains of corn are optimized for producing maximum plant material, which is mostly stalk and leaves. A field of feed corn plants will usually be very tall, 8-15 feet. In contrast a field of sweet corn (grown for human consumption and possibly for processing into other foods), will be much shorter, since it's optimized to produce the most, largest and highest sugar content corn kernels, and any energy the plant spends to grow a tall stalk is wasted. Feed corn is harvested with big combines that just cut down the whole plant at ground level and chop everything up. The results are piled up and left to ferment. Once fermented, you have silage. I'd be surprised to learn anyone was harvesting sweet corn and saving the waste material to make silage. The equipment isn't designed to keep that stuff it just gets dumped back onto the field. And those strains of corn don't produce very much plant material since they're optimized for small plants and big cobs. Additionally you'd have to load all the waste material into trucks, which would significantly raise the cost of harvesting. And dumping that stuff back onto the field is a good thing, it helps keep the dirt down for the winter and decomposes into usable nutrients and fibrous material which helps reduce compacting, etc. It'd be expensive and labor intensive to try to capture the waste material from feed corn. It's easier and more economical to just plant feed corn or buy silage. You're right about straw, though. The harvesters are specifically designed to leave the straw in row pile behind them. Then you run a baler over that and it leaves a row of straw bales in the field. Then you run a stacker over that (or a flatbed trailer and buck 'em by hand) and you have a haystack.