CP Knerr

Luetta Robinson wrote:Hi,

I am very interested in the silage idea as a way to feed my poultry in the winter. I have turkeys, geese, ducks, and chickens. I was wondering what your thoughts were on storing the silage in 55 gallon steel drums? I'm working on eliminating plastic from my homestead in the capacity of touching food - mine or my livestock - in any way. I have some questions...
1) Do you have to pack the container all at once, or could you add to it for,..... say, a couple of weeks to fill it as long as you added the product you mentioned between layers?
2) Do the containers of silage need to be kept warm?
3) Did the mold reverse itself or did you remove it?
4) Would this technique work with adding grass and other greens? Like dandelions, comfrey, other edible plants?
5) How much of the product do you add to how much green material?

Thank you for sharing such a great idea!

Luetta
Alaska

Thanks for the great discussion!

To answer your questions:

1.) Yes, a 55 gallon barrel would work, or a plastic pickle barrel.  The important thing is it needs to be air tight.  I agree with removing plastics... I don't like buying plastic bags and then tossing them, this is more of an experiment.  In the future I think I will go with a pickle barrel since I don't need to throw it away and I can roll it.  These bags are really heavy to carry!
2.) I would think they would need to be kept warm.... but, I'm learning, nope!... even at 20 degrees F (-7C) they are not frozen.  They are not even close to freezing on the on the edges at this temperature.  They are stored in a barn, but that's open to the weather (all the windows are out, doors are off, etc.)
3.) I did not remove any mold.  I am dousing it with activated Effective Microorganisms (Look up Terraganix EM) right when I make it to try to avoid mold.
4.) I would think this would work great with other greens, so long as they are not puncturing the bag, I'd also not ensile a whole bunch of one type of plant, rather, naturally pull it in.  So if I'm gathering grass by my comfrey, toss the comfrey in front of the mower and bag it up.  My lawn for instance is mainly grass, with maybe 10% clover and dandelions, chickory, and plantain mainly.  
5.) I added about 1 1/2 gallons of activated EM I made to each contractor bag with about 4 oz EM-1, 4 oz blackstrap molasses, and the rest of the 1 1/2 gallon (40 oz) (unchlorinated) water from our well.  I'd say the bag was 1/2 full so it's probably 30? gallons of grass clippings in there, at least.  

I'm transitioning my property to more of a silvopasture/food forest setup, hence my interest in silage and experimentation now as we go more towards beef cattle and ruminants I'd like to use this instead of hay.  The hay can get easily rained on here and with the trees, well, it won't dry too well either so I wanted a way to make feed more reliably (eventually).

Regarding the Vitamin B Deficiency some thoughts... well, one element of the EM-1 I'm introducing when ensiling the grass is brewer's yeast which is very high in Vitamin B-12, so I'm hopeful that would not be a problem.  I sort of let the animals choose what to eat and give them as much variety as possible and let them figure it out.  Especially with nutritional values of feeds, it's useful as a starting point but even corn is not corn; the older varieties will have more protein than modern hybrid types so I let the animals choose.

I have fed the silage to our waterfowl and they clean it up, especially in winter.

Improvements I'll be making:
1.) Use pickle barrels.  This will help me roll them and protect them.  It's hard dealing with a heavy bag of grass while trying not to tear the bag.
2.) (lightly) salt the silage with sea salt for minerals.
3.) It's a pain to mix the EM in while packing the bags.  So instead, I will spray it on the lawn grass before ensiling it to ensure a good mix as it's being bagged.   I think this would also require less EM-1 this way.

Attached is a photo of the bag dumped for the pigs a few days ago, on a 20 degree F morning.:

I had collected some images from our Johnson Su composting process.  We set up this system 2 years ago now.   This process is not good for creating yards of compost, it was more of an experiment for us and I used the finished compost in our nursery to introduce biology to the mix.

This system is a pile that you don't need to turn, and uses worms as the finishing agent.  To get air to the pile, as you'll see in the images, you form vertical air channels with pipes.  The idea is no compost in the reactor is further than 1 foot away from air.  

The container is made of 2x4 welded wire with landscape ground cloth fixed to it.  The whole thing sits off the ground on a pallet, and holes are cut in the pallet to allow air to flow up into the vertical channels.

The materials were rotted wood chips and grass clippings, mixed about 50/50.  I also added in some native soil and some nearly finished compost to help get the process going.

My daughter was on mashing duty, stirring up the materials in water to saturate them.

After she mashed the materials together, I filled the container with the pipes situated above the holes to form channels.  The challenge here was keeping the pipes in place while packing in the materials.  

After the whole thing was full, we waited a couple of days and then pulled the pipes out.  The result was formed channels through the compost.

Then we measured temperatures.  they rose to about 165 and stayed there for 3 or 4 days, then dropped back down.  When the top 6" of the pile were about 80 degrees, I added in a pound of red wiggler composting worms.

We built this in August and let it work the rest of the year and the whole next year.  I kept it watered daily with a soaker hose.

The finished compost was like the finest worm castings, almost like dust when dry.  When it is damp, it's almost a clay like material, it really broke it down.

This option is great if you don't want to do any turning and want to use your compost more to introduce biology to soil.  As far as bulk compost, this method would be more space and time intensive to build the bioreactors and let them sit for a year or more.

Thanks for the welcome, guys and gals!

I'll see if I can get to some homesteading festivals.   I did a presentation on composting worms for a local group and I really enjoyed the company and people.

Attached is a PDF on getting started with vermicompost or vermiculture.  

It takes you through my last 4-5 years of vermicomposting/vermiculture up into the realm of where I'm at now with homemade continuous flow through bins and 96 square feet of vermiculture space.    I have some pics of the bins so you can see what you're getting in the presentation.

This system would be suitable for a heated or unheated garage in the northern US.  The breeding bins are stored in an unheated, open barn throughout the winter (protected from the wind but not the cold temperatures), and insulated with chopped leaves.  It's been 5 degrees F outside here but the bins are still at 55-60 degrees in the interior where the worms are.  No supplemental heat at all.

I gave this presentation for a local homesteading group.

Please feel free to offer suggestions or share any comments.

Also, feel free to share or use as you see fit!

Here is another idea if you have an old leaky water trough or two about: Homemade Continuous Flow Through Bin, this one is out of a stock tank with 3/4" EMT conduit for the bottom.  I drilled holes with a hole saw and bent the conduit over so it wouldn't fall out.  

I also spaced the conduit so it would be spaced for the tool I'm using to scrape the castings out, in my case, an old corn fork to pull the cobs down out of a crib.

To start it out, you put in a layer of cardboard, some bedding, and your worms.  

Then you scrape the castings off the bottom and keep adding your feed and fresh bedding to the top.  The castings can sit on the ground to dry for a few days before sifting.

The bedding is rotted wood chips, compost, and shredded (non-glossy) paper.

I've been using these bagster worm bins ala Meme's worms on Youtube.  The internal frame is 3/4" PVC piping and fittings.  They are permeable on the bottom so moisture won't pool.   If I remember correctly it was about $35 for the bagster and then maybe $20-$25 in fittings/pipe.



We started with 5 lbs of worms and they eat all of our kitchen scraps and other old veggie scraps from a food pantry operation, as well as all of our cardboard and paper scraps.  Grass clippings.  Pig and cow poop and straw bedding.

I also fed them some old spoiled feed from the feed store.  

We have a mist system set up to multiply the worms.  I think this plus the permeability of the bag is key.

This fall I split the one bin into 3.  In the middle of the bin they had multiplied such that if you stuck your hand in near some food, it was a wriggling mass 1 inch thick.  You could literally pick up a pound of worms in your hand with a scoop or two.

Worms are incredibly resilient!

What I've found to increase their numbers the fastest is 1.) Feeding/bedding on top of the bin and 2.) Misting them.  

I think the mist and the feed on top really keep them reproducing.

What kind of worms do you have?  We raise red wigglers and european night crawlers.

Anne Miller wrote:
That looks like the green part of a good compost pile to me.

Have you tried making compost?

Compost is one of the loveliest things that I have seen on this earth.

Thanks!

Yes, I've made compost... lots of it over the years   The big thing at this point was I didn't have a whole lot of browns to mix in with it, and wanted to experiment.

I will make some composting posts in the future.

This summer while mowing the lawn, I was contemplating what else I could do with the grass. I was spending time mowing the lawn on our pathways and aside of our driveway and just leaving the clippings there to break down, use mulch and feed to the pigs as supplemental feed, but what else?  

I like to figure out many uses for everything as after a while I run out of things to mulch and the pigs only eat so much grass at a time.

So late this summer, I tried out ensiling them in garbage bags for supplemental winter feed for the pigs.

I mow until the mower bagger is full.

Then I packed 3 mower bagger bags into a single large garbage bag in layers, packing them very tight between layers.     I also sprinkled about a gallon and a half of activated EM-1 microbes in as I packed the grass to get the ensiling process started.  These microbes are a consortium of 3 main types: Lactic Acid bacteria, Brewer's Yeast, and Purple Non-Sulfur Bacteria.  If you look up "Terraganix EM-1" online you can find out a lot more about this, and I will also write more about them as I have time.    I then sat on the bags and squeezed them and twisted them until all the air was out. I attached a couple of photos for your viewing pleasure

One thing I learned from this was that 3 full mower bags of grass weighs about 120 pounds, so the bags are really heavy to move and carry around.  It's more about what you can carry vs. how big a bag of packed grass you can make.

I made 4 bags total this year as an experiment one day.

I put the bags in the barn and kept an eye on them as I didn't know what would happen with the temperatures.  But they never heated higher than ambient temps.  They did build up a little bit of gas but not much as the grass "pickled".

I opened one of them up and there is very, very little mold, it's just nice, sweet smelling silage.  The pigs like it enough, they don't gorge on it but it does give them something to work on here in the winter.  

I will follow up with some pics of the pigs enjoying their silage tomorrow when I feed them another bag.

I am planning on doing this again next year as well, and think the silage could also be used for chickens and our waterfowl for winter supplementation.

Has anybody else played around with this for pigs, cattle, or other critters?

Hello everybody from snowy Western NY State in the USA!

I was introduced to permaculture by fate when I purchased a 36 acre property with a house and a barn in 2003.  It was a fix-er-upper and I had saved up a down payment and it seemed like the thing to do at the time.  I remember being so excited to move in that we had chickens started before we left our rental house.  When the landlord visited as we were getting ready to leave, he said, "Those are going with you, right?"

It started with those chickens, then went to horses, goats, turkeys, and finally pigs and cows.  In the meantime I was also raising a large garden for a vegetable CSA and got interested in bees as well.  

Over a few years, I had also gotten interested in masonry heaters and wood fired ovens and worked on building a company with a neighbor.  I worked on that for a couple years until finances meant I had to go back to work.

Shortly after that, I got married, had a couple of kids and are trying for some more, and now over the past 5 years we're getting rolling again.  

With the kids and family life, I found I haven't had the same amount of time and attention necessary to run the vegetable operation, plus I really like the perennial, low input systems better anyway.  I love the idea of systems that reproduce on their own like perennials, worms, and livestock, where I can automate the daily chores and focus on the family more.  Way better lifestyle than veggie farming for me.

I took a course on soil science and that led to making biochar and raising composting worms.  I also started building up a plant nursery with berries, shrubs, perennials, and some other "permacultury" things like comfrey and sunchokes.  I do a lot of the propagation myself and am in fact in the midst of writing a book about it, for people like me without a ton of money for infrastucture but want to bootstrap a business small and build up a small scale home-based business around their family time.  Or even if you're not interested in selling, getting their property landscape going quickly with plants they produce themselves.  I believe everyone should have a nursery!