by Ina, Golden Waves WIFE

Kansas is one of the top beef-producing states in the United States. In 2001, almost 23% of the cattle fed in the United States were fed in Kansas. All those cattle consume huge quantities of Kansas grains, hay, and other feed. Silage is one type of cattle feed. Silage is made from corn, milo or grain sorghum, or other growing crops. Using special machinery, fields of green plants are chopped into very small pieces. The small pieces are packed tightly together, with all the air being "squeezed" out to prevent the feed from growing moldy. If the feed has been prepared correctly, it will ferment - rather than grow moldy - and the result is a sweet-tasting feed. Another name for silage is "ensilage".

These farmers are busy in their farm shop repairing their silage harvester. They call it a "chopper" because it is made to chop corn, wheat, triticale, or any other green crop into very small bits for cattle feed. This machine needed a new feed roll installed. The roll with the bright yellow paint is the newer roll.

The chopper has a lot of fast moving parts and many of those parts are very sharp - even when the machine is not running. At the time of this picture, the "head" was off the chopper so that the men could repair anything in that area that needed fixing before they went to the cornfield to chop corn. Many hours are needed each summer to ready this machine for the silage harvest.

This is the silage harvester in the cornfield. Notice that the head is attached to the machine now. The head gathers the corn stalks into the copper portion of the machine. The head gathers four 30 inch rows of corn stalks at a time as it goes through the field. The chopper will cut, chop, and throw corn silage into a truck at the rate of 4 to 5 tons per minute. It doesn't take long to fill a truck at that rate.

This corn is over nine feet tall. The machine runs five miles per hour and chops the corn into 3/16 inch pieces. The engine that powers this machine is very powerful and also quite loud when it is chopping a big crop at this speed. The operator sits in an air-conditioned cab and must be alert constantly. He is accustomed to the speed, the sound and vibrations of the machine so he will know instantly if something goes wrong with the chopper.

This farm truck has a movable end panel made of heavy canvas, two feet tall net silage racks above the regular grain panels, and a large hydraulic hoist to lift the truck box up so the chopped silage can be dumped at the storage pit. In the picture, the truck is dumping silage. The trucks are very important to the silage harvest since the chopped feeed has to be hauled from the field where it grew to the storage facility. This truck hauls approximately 16 tons of corn silage in each load.

Each chopper has to have four or five trucks on the job to keep the chopped feed hauled away. Silage harvest is a very busy time.

A tractor with a dozer blade mounted on the front is used in the storage pit. The tractor pushes the chopped feed up into a big pile.

This tractor is used for many things needing a great deal of power all through the year. It is truly an "iron horse" on this ranch. During silage harvest, it becomes a packer tractor. With its eight big wheels - each one 6 feet tall - and its weight of 35,000 pounds, it is very useful for packing silage into the storage pits. This procedure pushes the tiny corn plant pieces together by pressing the air from around the corn plant particles. This eliminates most of the air and keeps the cattle feed from spoiling.

Can you see the tracks made by the tractor? When the operator has the entire surface of the pile covered with tracks, he knows he has packed that load sufficiently. This pit is 200 feet wide and 300 feet long. It holds more than 10,000 tons of corn silage as you see it here. The rancher has other pits for storage of other crops.