How to Make Corn Silage at Home!

Use cornstalks out of your garden to make small batch silage and save on your feed bill. Silage production is entirely scalable - we’ll show you how!

#silage #fodder #cornsilage

The growing season has ended, and you’ve had a good crop of corn - and now it’s time to process the stalks and ready the plot for the next season’s use.

You have a few choices, including making autumn decorations, composting them, burning them, or - say it ain’t so - disposing of them in the garbage.

If you’ve got barnyard animals such as horses, cattle, sheep, goats, and chickens, silage made from that corn can be used to augment your normal feeding routines for those animals.

You’ve likely seen silage being produced in rural areas where corn or maize is. Remember seeing large mounds that are covered with white sheeting and weighed down with tires? That’s silage being produced for the following season.

Producing silage utilizes what could be a waste product and makes it into feed that is highly palatable for animals, all the while reducing your feed bill. Silage can be made in very small batches as well - ideal for those of us home gardeners.

Think of silage as “pickled pasture.” Feedstock can come from crops such as corn, oats, wheat, alfalfa, legumes, maize, grasses, barley, sorghum, millet, and canola. Silage is made by chopping what remains after harvesting the main crop into small pieces and fermenting the matter in the absence of oxygen.

Initially, lactic acid bacteria (LAB) ferment the crop’s water-soluble carbohydrates (WSC) into acetic acid (vinegar is diluted acidic acid) and lactic acid. The formation of these acids lowers the pH of the silage, making it too acidic for other microbes to grow. Since the silage is covered and a ready supply of oxygen is excluded, fermentation sets in after about 2 days. As fermentation proceeds, the concentration of acetic acid diminishes, and lactic acid becomes dominant. Complete fermentation can occur as early as two weeks, with the result being silage that is characterized by a pleasant scent, with a slight fermented and sweet smell. Some have described it as somewhat like “bread and butter” pickles.

The optimum time to get corn silage to ferment well and to be able to pack tightly for the ensilage process is when the stalks are about 65% moisture or 35% dry matter. More on this later.

Here is how we make silage. We use a small chipper/shredder, machete for harvesting the corn stalks, 5-gallon plastic buckets, large plastic tarp, and 33-gallon plastic trash liners with pull ribbons.

We harvest all the corn stalks cut close to the ground and put them on a cart with the ends all pointing the same way. Once we have all the cornstalks in a pile near our chipper, we set up the chipper with the ejection chute exiting out over our tarp.

If you don’t have a medium-sized gas-powered chipper shredder like we do, a small electric vertical chipper can work too. Just adjust your feed rate to match the capability of your equipment. It’s possible to hand chop as our ancestors did and still get a good result. This is fine for small batches. You’ll need to ensure that the resulting pieces of cornstalk are 1” (2.5 cm) or less.

Grind or chop the corn over the tarp to ensure the silage stays clean.

Once you have finished the chopping process, separate out stringy leaves and larger pieces of matter. I discard those back into the garden plot and turn them under later.

If the resulting ensilage feels dry and doesn’t compact readily, add a bit of water. Don’t overdo it. It’s easier to add water than it is to remove it! Use a sprinkling can to add small amounts of water and then turn it with your pitchfork until moisture is dispersed evenly through the pile. The pile should not be soggy, but spongy - meaning you can grab a handful, compress it, and the silage will expand back out. A bit of experimentation from season to season will perfect your technique!

Now, line a five-gallon bucket with a 33-gallon plastic trash can liner and pack the silage into the container, compressing each layer as you go. Your goal is to expel as much air as you can. Continue these steps until the bucket is full. Be sure to pull up the sides of the trash liner as you go.

To give one final compaction, overfill the bucket a bit, and use a 5-gallon bucket, filled with water and sealed with a lid, to use as a weight to set on the silage-filled bucket and press out as much as possible and compress the silage. Then rapidly tie off the bag.

Do these steps with additional buckets and liners until you’ve used up your supply.

To ensure that air doesn’t get sucked back into the silage, we don’t put lids on the buckets - except for one. We stack the unlidded buckets on top of each other, with a lid only on the top bucket.

When spring arrives again, we’ll have feed supplements for our chickens that will encourage their natural foraging behavior AND reduce feather picking.

JUST DO IT YOURSELF!