Early thinking about spring silage should include maintenance of machinery, storage areas and tracks, sourcing plastic, twine or net wrap and inoculants.

Growers making early and regular contact with contractors or vice-versa will help reduce problems when everyone is busy.

Choice of which paddocks to cut will consider the obvious topography, access and feedout issues, with some people preferring to cut convenient paddocks while others will graze close paddocks and cut further away to reduce stock walking.

Soil fertility and weed management are major considerations when we start getting into detail on paddock selection and management.

Silage removes large amounts of nutrients including nitrogen (N), phosphorous (P), potassium (K) and sulphur (S) which must be allowed for and monitored using soil tests. It can be a great way to reduce nutrient build-up in effluent disposal areas provided withholding periods are observed to minimise animal health risks. 

If potassium is needed, and it often is if silage or hay is regularly taken from a paddock, then split applications early in spring to allow growth and again after silage harvest to replace nutrients will reduce the risk of luxury uptake.

This is where the plant absorbs more K than it needs, meaning you lose fertiliser, while the silage has excess K with possible associated feed quality issues.

Nitrogen also needs to be applied sensibly.

Top-dressing early in spring to ensure good growth is usually essential but excess nitrogen can interfere with silage fermentation and nitrate poisoning is a risk. Both are unusual in Australian silage but should be considered.

Top-dressing rates for rye-grass will depend on if you take a grazing management priority and harvest at three leaves or want to optimise your yield of high quality silage and harvest at the boot or early head emergence stage of growth.

One guide to how much fertiliser should be applied after the grazing prior to silage harvest is to allow for the nutrients removed in the silage, which would be 30kg N/tonne DM if the silage was 19 per cent crude protein with about 25kg K/tonne DM.

We often underestimate how much N and K is removed in silage and hay.

Weed management is also a major consideration in paddock selection, both from a silage quality and weed control perspective.

Using silage for weed control is highly effective and becoming more important as increasing herbicide resistance issues affect more farmers.

Silage will help reduce weeds in two ways.

Early harvest compared to hay means that often the weed seed is not fully developed and also the silage fermentation process will significantly reduce weed seed viability if there is any mature seed harvested.

From a silage quality perspective, grass weeds may not be a big issue, but broadleaf weeds can affect silage quality.

Many broadleaf weeds such as capeweed have a high buffering capacity and low WSC levels, making it hard to get a good fermentation.

Another question which sometimes influences paddock selection is disease or insect damage.

This especially applies to rust, where the general advice is to make a decision early and avoid badly infested crops because the rust on leaves is dead material which could have a negative effect on fermentation and feed quality, similar to any dead matter that is mixed in with silage.

Finally, when paddocks for silage are identified, make sure you remove hazards such as irrigation pipes, electric fence posts and pasture harrows, and mark rocks or stumps early while you can see them.

By Neil Griffiths,

Pasture production technical specialist,

NSW DPI