Silaging First Cut Alfalfa!

good morning everybody today is going to be an awesome day we're going to be chopping that first cut of alfalfa silage we started actually cutting it with a swather sunday and the rest of it went down yesterday so today is tuesday and we're going to start chopping here at about seven o'clock in the morning should just be a one day thing first cut for us is never too big the big days the weakest salary that's always barley salads right in the middle of summer so this is kind of warm up for that but uh we're just heading over to the vet room right now right in our barn there and i'm gonna put some inoculant in our chopper here that's just gonna help these silage ferment a little bit better it's gonna get us some better quality feed [Music] so so that's our inoculant mixed up and then this is my sister miriam she's gonna be trucking today but she's got the regular water bucket i'm gonna dump this in there first there's gonna be a lot left in that bucket i'll put that one into there rinse it out again because this stuff is incredibly expensive and we wanna get every single little bit of it in there so and the last thing i did just put some ice packs in there this stuff has to stay cold so there are the silage pits we're gonna be dumping today fields right there so super close which is awesome because then i'm not gonna have to be waiting for trucks at least the first part of today second part the second field is quite a bit further away from the farm so i imagine i'll have to be waiting a little bit but we'll have to see depends also how thick the crop is it's not that thick but i actually took some drone shots of this stuff being cut yesterday naleen did that in the swather with the draper header so we'll cut to that quickly and then we'll get to chopping [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] well that's the first field finished off here got about 24 loads off of it it's about 35 to 40 acres i think so not an insane amount of time it's probably around four or five tons an acre we'll take it got the chopper in transport mode so we pull it back in put the spout straight behind us just that we're a little bit smaller when we head down the road and we're going to head over to the next field now we're just driving down the road here you never want to go max speed because otherwise that spout is going to flop all over the place and it's really hard on it you never know if you swing it around a little bit too hard you might knock that spout off so you gotta take it easy so this is the next field it's quite a bit bigger so hopefully we get a ton more loads off of here so earlier in the morning we had a little lump go through the chopper and that kind of jacked up the auger there that brings the silage to the spout there and the chopper itself but that got hung up on the side there so we just had to use a crowbar get it down again and as long as we don't go over any more lumps that won't be an issue anymore it just kind of gets hung up on the side there i better check the inoculant here quickly make sure i'm not putting too much on because everything we got is already in here so she is going she's going pretty quick probably tone it back a little bit i'll see if i can get that gopro up in the box of this truck here for you guys see a load fill up um bad news i just hopped in the truck with brent and he brought me back to the yard so i can grab a new tractor because the versatile the hydraulics on that thing just all of a sudden quit working completely i couldn't move them at all and they're doing weird things when you're plugging a hydraulic back in that would pretty much shut the tractor off i don't know what the heck is going on with that thing but we're gonna grab this magnum now i'm gonna have to finish shopping with this baby obviously it's not going to be as nice chopping with this rig but it's still going to work luckily this thing actually has quite a bit of horsepower i think it's like 180 or something like that so the versatiles maybe 210 it is a little bit of a drop it's going to slow us down a little bit but we're still going to be able to get the job done luckily we don't have an insane amount of acres to cover today we should still be able to easily finish this up today and uh be done by tonight have that pit cover tonight that's what we want because we're still hoping for all right let's do the old swaparoo [Applause] all right we got her swapped around verse style sitting real sad over there let's put my seats all the way down otherwise i can't see the top of the truck otherwise i'm sitting up here i gotta be able to see the top of that spout friend just move the tractor out of the way see how she goes okay one thing that i noticed right away in the versatile and the mx25 i'm able to swivel the seat sideways so it's kind of in between but now it's just only facing forward enough to turn my neck all the way back little things so we're starting to struggle a little bit uh the alfalfa is getting really dry and you can tell because it's kind of flopping out of the spout you can see it's not going in a nice straight stream out of the end of that spot anymore it's kind of falling out a little bit too soon and that's just because it's so light and it's getting pretty dry we didn't think this would dry out as quick as it is it looks like it's drying out by the minute so we got to keep at her this field is the last field that's uh cut two days ago so uh as soon as we're done this the next field is going to be fine it's going to be a lot more moist because it wasn't on the ground as long but this stuff is really starting to dry out and if you don't have enough moisture in the silage pit it's not going to ferment properly and the feed isn't going to be so high quality so we gotta really keep at it here shouldn't be too much longer we're probably gonna be in this field for another hour and a half maybe tops so not too bad it is getting dry you guys can just hear it crack and it's starting to feel like hey the bottom parts of the swaths are nowhere near as bad but on the top you can see the leaves they're all starting to crimp just blowing away in the wind but uh gonna check that inoculant out right now the inoculant is really gonna help this dryer stuff in the silage pit so i wanna make sure we're not running low on that stuff all right so the inoculant is empty so i need to switch it to this little water reservoir here and that's going to clean out all the lines if you leave the inoculant in the lines for a day or two days you're going to end up with a bunch of solid stuff it gets hard it kind of turns into a goo after a couple days which is kind of odd well there goes the last load of the day so we're gonna shut her down here pull that spout in back that's a little pile here still quite a bit of bunk to fill yet so he's barely getting up on top of that pile now just because it's the end he wants to get that ramp on the pile here a little bit steeper it's nicer to put plastic on and then you don't need to drag it out as far [Music] but he's just gonna finish this pile off here then we're gonna have to grab some plastic and throw some tires so [Music] anyway guys that is gonna be it for today's video we got the pile covered nice little silage pit would have loved to get a few more loads in there but uh it's the way she goes i guess we're gonna be uh refilling the other end of this pit hopefully later this summer with the second cut of alfalfa and we're probably not gonna fill it up all the way so we're just gonna push up some p silage probably is what we're gonna do and fill this pile completely up otherwise there's no point really having these concrete bunkers if you're not going to fill them so we might as well put something else in there but that is going to be it for today's video guys if you enjoyed be sure to hit those like and subscribe buttons down below and uh hope to see you guys in the next video thanks for watching

Channel: SaskDutch Kid

Views: 84,891

Rating: 4.987937 out of 5

Keywords: dairy farming, dairy cattle, farming in canada, canadian dairy farm, dairy, farm, farming, farm vlog, farm vlog channel, farming selfie, holstein, holstein cow, holstein farm, cow farm, farming milk cows, tractor, seeder, combine, crop farmer, land farmer

Id: 12vsGniSKBQ

Length: 12min 23sec (743 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 23 2021