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Faunsdale, AL | Pioneer guy (Bill Mahanna???) said there's very little difference in the starch quality among commercial lines at least at the present time. That was in something I read lately.
If you look at the economics of it, you can go two ways........
High grain hybrids where the energy comes from the grain and the forage is there to limit the rate of passage mostly
High digestable/low lignin like BMR where there may be less grain but the forage is more digestable so it usually makes up for it. The forage is more like feeding hay than corn stalks.
Which way is best depends on how much each kind yields and how much acreage you have to grow your silage as well as your forage supply situation. I know I would love to have all BMR silage this year with the hay prices. Only problem with that would be that I would be short of silage.
Our BMR didn't keep up with the conventional. It was planted at the exact wrong time of all our corn and got hit with the worst growing conditions. Still, if I had planted all of the best Mycogen variety we tried, I would have been very happy with it. Just now getting into that silage. It will be fed as a 50/50 blend with conventional grain type hybrids chopped 3/8" TLC and processed. Milkers called this morning and said they had to put about 30 cows' milk in the calf milk tank to finish milking, so maybe that's a good sign? It's the time of year when we're coming up in milk anyway, and the milk hauler may have just misfigured when he had to be back.
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Digestible silages
