Corn Silage

Today was a pretty interesting day... cleaned up part of the house, sent a fax that took about 10 thousand years to actually send, drove with Brent, and most interestingly of all, saw pretty much the whole process of corn becoming corn silage. (For those of you who do not know what corn silage is I suggest that you look it up on Wiki (just like I did) and that should give you a pretty good, perhaps overly good explanation, of the nitty-gritty's of silage but my explanation will be short, dumbed down, and hopefully easy to follow.)

For multiple days every year the only answer to what Dad had been doing all day was "he was out packin' the pit." Although I have ridden in the tractor with him for many hours as he packed I had never been able to see the whole process of corn to silage until today. My day started out with a thoroughly frustrating experience with the fax machine and then a little jot over to see my daddy. This was pretty much the scene that met my gaze (although I didn't take the picture it is a pretty accurate representation of what was occurring on my farm.)

I rode with the "Pops" for a hour or two as he "packed the pit" and was about to head home when he trick/mislead me into seeing the rest of the operation at work. The Wadsworthswere doing the cutting and hauling of the corn and I was able to ride along and see everything first hand.

So first the corn is grown (this is the step that takes the longest and of course it is the easiest to explain... corn seeds planted, corn watered, corn grew.)

Next when the corn is sufficiently dry yet still yellow-green wet it is cut by this enormous tractor with lots of blades that turn the whole stock from the-stocks-of-corn-you-see-on-peoples-porches-in-Autumn to something that resembles confetti all in just a few seconds! The corn is then blown from the corn cutting machine into the truck that is following along side.


Once the corn is in the truck it is brought back to wherever the "silage pit" is going to be and dumped and that is where my daddy's job starts... He is the pit packer. He uses a tractor to push the silage into a pile and then runs over and over it to pack it down. (This job according to my father is mindless work and is when he gets to make a lot of phone calls and does his thinking.)

The last part of the process involves covering the "pit" with heavy plastic and tires... this part will probably be coming in the next few days!


Thanks Dad and Ben for a wonderful education even though I am no longer in school, well in organized school anyway!

(The pictures have all be stolen from different places on the Internet... I know I am in so much trouble!)