Making corn, wheat, or Sugarcane Silage and checking its quality is one thing, but knowing the intake and digestibility is another essential factor, especially when it comes to feeding it to your cows. Learning the fundamentals of silage intake and digestibility is also necessary to determine its effects on your dairy farm cattle. That’s what we want, high silage digestibility and intake for our cattle. Let us at Silage Agro Private Limited find out all about silage intake and digestibility and how we can increase it.

Factors determining silage intake and digestibility

The intake of silage is usually lower than that of fresh forage. It is because of the cows’ habits of roaming around and grazing on fresh grass. Here are some other reasons why our cows’ have low intake for silage.

• The presence of toxic substances created during the fermentation procedure as amino acids.
• High concentrations of organic acids and reduced water-soluble carbohydrate content decrease energy availability for the growth of microorganisms in our cows’ rumens.

The solution: Rajpura Silage recommends properly managing the ensiling process to produce well-preserved fodder. Adding silage additives can increase intake values, but these can affect digestibility, so we don’t recommend using chemicals. Remember, there should be a natural balance between silage intake and digestibility.

Dry Matter (DM): Dry Matter or DM is the essential part of fodder your cows consume, but it is the part most people ignore when making silage. A misconception is that the higher the DM, the more intake. However, the ideal DM is 30-40%.

Silage Quality: Not only does this factor affect the intake of sugarcane, corn, or Wheat Silage, but it also affects digestibility. Let’s discuss some points regarding this.

• Poor quality silage will smell foul and taste bad, which results in low intake.
• It affects digestibility and can create health issues in your cows.
• Quality silage tastes and smells good, increasing your cows' intake and digestibility, meaning more consumption and nutritional benefits.

This concludes our blog on silage intake and digestibility. We at Silage Agro Private Limited hope you got valuable information from it. Thank you for reading.