With lower milk and beef prices coupled with increasing corn seed prices, there is good reason to contemplate the optimum planting rate for silage corn. Recently, researchers in both Virginia and Wisconsin weighed in on the topic. Gonzalo Ferreira, extension dairy scientist at Virginia Tech, reported on the second year of planting rate study in the Dairy Pipeline newsletter. In 2015, silage corn was planted in four southern Virginia plots at rates of 22,000 to...

The author is a forage consultant in Bay City, Wis. Several years into my forage career I encountered a high-producing, well-managed herd struggling with managing forage piles. It wasn’t...

Adequately processed kernels separated from the stover and leaves using the float test. The title might fool you into thinking we’re discussing NFL stats, but the focus is actually a topic with...

Forage is an indispensable part of dairy cow diets. However, due to its bulkiness and the inherently low levels of fiber digestibility, cows are limited in how much forage they can consume...

In my many years spent as a county extension agronomist in one of the largest dairy counties in Wisconsin, I heard a lot of reasons to grow brown midrib (BMR) corn and a lot of reasons not to...

A number of years ago one of my kids came home with their report card and presented it to me. Embedded alongside the list of class names and numbers were a few B’s and a couple of C’s...

Visual characteristics of BMR hybrids include a darker stalk and leaf mid-rib. The brown mid-rib (BMR) corn silage market is still nowhere close to that of conventional silage corn, but hyb...

From the standpoint of a dairy ration, there are a lot of players with skin in the game. There's the dairy farmer, who probably has the most at stake from an economic standpoint. But there's also th...

The New York state agricultural plastics recycling program is one of the best in the nation. Even so, there’s still plenty of room for more involvement by farmers and agencies. Billions of pou...

Jason Felling wasn’t expecting the letter he received in the mail stating their farm, Felling Dairy LLC, was a finalist in World Forage Analysis Superbowl held at this year’s World Dairy Exp...