54. Baleage – A mystery surprise or valuable nutrients for our ruminants? Part 1.

Baleage can be a fantastic way to conserve pasture or crop, moving forage from times of feed surpluses to times of feed deficits. Once wrapped in plastic, all baleage looks somewhat the same. Yet behind that plastic lurks all types of feed, from very high quality baleage through to absolute compost. This latest podcast focusses on assessing the quality of baleage as a feed for your stock. After discussing how to assess baleage, we move onto the importance of getting good quality forage into a bale at the appropriate dry matter (DM) percentage to optimise baleage quality. Part 2 of this podcast series will focus on further aspects of baling forage, including chop length, bale compaction, individual versus tube-wrapping of bales, and answers the question of “just how long do we need to leave baleage from wrapping until feed out”?