More than six months have passed since March when most of the world realized that COVID-19 was a serious, deadly, virus. Where and what we ate went through a drastic change. It took a while before the logistics of getting the food to where consumers needed it were worked out. We became more conscious of what we needed to eat and. . .
where it really came from. Farmers markets and direct farm to consumer sales increased as more people looked for that eye to eye contact with the farmers who produced the food.
Now that we are entering the third week of September, the leaves are beginning to take on their fall mantel which helps make our Ottawa Valley such a beautiful place to call home.
As we made best use of the beautiful weather this past Sunday afternoon to check out the new fall colours, I also noticed that some corn silage had already been taken off the fields. Although it is a little early and the corn silage is still a little too wet, when a farmer is coming to the bottom of the corn silo and it takes a couple weeks for corn silage to cook, or ensile properly before feeding it to the cattle. Some farmers made a small pile of early cut corn to feed before the rest of the corn crop is cut, cooked and ready to feed.
I began to think of the many changes that farmers have made in the way corn silage is made and stored now compared to 70 years ago. I remember when dad drove two black horses pulling a one row corn binder to cut the corn. The binder tied the corn into sheaves and dropped the sheaves on the ground. Then the labour intensive job of stooking the corn into corn stooks of 10-15 sheaves. Once the corn stooks dried a little and the starches began to change to sugars the corn cutting bees started in our neighbourhood when farmers worked together loading the stooks of corn sheaves onto horse drawn wagons and hauling them to the corn cutter set up at the old upright wooden stave silo.
Our silo was 14 feet across and 28 feet high. The corn cutter was owned by a syndicate or group of farmers who worked together but each farmer provided the tractor to run the corn cutter. The cutter was driven by the belt pulley on the tractor and a seven inch wide endless flat belt going to the pulley on the corn cutter which had an endless steel apron where the sheaves were placed. This conveyed them into a set of feed rollers which traveled at just the right speed to feed in sheaves of corn into the blower equipped with six big knives that cut the corn into one inch long pieces. Then, the blower blew the chopped corn up the silo pipes into the silo. At the top of the silo pipes was a hood which deflected the direction of the chopped corn into down pipes which were guided around the silo by one man so that the chopped corn was evenly distributed into the silo.
There were always several other men in the silo to tramp and compact the corn. The silo pipes and hood traveled with the corn chopper from farm to farm, as they were too expensive for each farmer to own by himself. If the corn crop was a little too big for the silo, snow fence was put around the top of the silo to make the silo a little bit higher. The silo always settled during the week following being filled and the silage would settle down below the snow fence into the silo. Some men got nervous on the silo when the corn was higher than the silo and had to be replaced by braver souls.
Once the silo was full-full, the men on top had to take down the silo pipes and shimmy down until they could reach the old wooden ladder.
By the 1950s farmers had more powerful tractors to power and pull one or two row forage harvesters replacing the corn binders, horse drawn wagons and the corn cutter at the silo. Soon pit silos which were only a deep trench in the ground with earth sides and floor began to replace upright silos. Some upright cement silos are still used today but large bunk silos with cement walls and floors have became popular because they can be filled more quickly with the large capacity self-propelled forage harvesters used today. Instead of men tramping corn today large four-wheel-drive tractors with push blades or heavy industrial loaders can easily keep up to the endless stream of corn delivered by huge silage wagons or trucks coming every few minutes from choppers that can now have as big as a 16 row corn head and more than one thousand horsepower.
Corn silage chopped with the old corn cutter left cobs chopped in one inch pieces and the cows would eat the corn kernels, leaves and chopped up stalks but leave the corn cobs in the manger. Corn harvesters have been equipped with kernel processors since the late 1990s and the cob pieces even hard, mature kernels are broken up into pieces smaller than 1/8 inch. Many corn harvesters today are equipped with shredders which not only smash up kernels and cobs but also scuff and shred fiber in pieces of mature stocks and leaves allowing them to be more easily digested by cattle. All corn silage passes through these shredder rolls which turn at a different speed and are only five mm apart.
Today’s dairy cow produces three times more milk per day and expels three times less methane gas as they did less than a century ago because of better genetics and better feed rations balanced better than our own.
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations.
gladcrest@gmail.com
