How to Identify Good and Poor Silage: Learn to Easily Tell Good from Bad

After silage is sealed in the silo, it can generally be opened and used after 40-50 days. However, due to various reasons during the ensiling process, the quality of the silage may vary. The techniques for identifying its quality are introduced below:

After opening the silo, reach 20 cm into the silo and take out some silage, then judge it based on its color, smell and texture:

High-quality silage:

The color is green or yellow-green, with a luster. The smell is aromatic, with a vinous and sour odor, giving a pleasant feeling. The texture and structure are moist and compact, but easy to separate, and the stems, leaves and flowers keep their original shape.

Poor-quality silage:

There are two kinds of poor-quality silage: one is rancid silage. This kind of silage has insufficient sourness, an obvious putrid odor and a pungent sensation, is mostly dark green, has a high moisture content, and feels slippery when touched by hand. This rancid silage has very poor palatability and very low nutritional value, and livestock such as beef cattle will develop diarrhea if they eat too much of it. The main reasons for this poor-quality feed are that the silage raw material was not harvested within the suitable period, had too high a moisture content and was not dried in the sun, or that rainwater entered during and after ensiling.

The other kind of poor-quality silage is scorched silage, which has a scorched smell and a musty smell, appears brown, has a low moisture content, very poor palatability and very low nutritional value. The reasons for this situation are that the silage raw material was too mature and harvested too late. The raw material was cut too long, was not easy to compact, or was not loaded into the silo in time, delaying for too long and sealing the top too late, causing the silage to be oxidized and heated too much.