Chris Roulin has reduced the amount of feed he loses to spoilage and spillage to almost zero since he started using a rotary defacer two years ago.
Roulin, who milks 100 cows on his farm near Stonewall, Man., says the Emily Mobile Rotor Bucket drops almost no silage on the concrete bunker floors, something that had been a problem when he loaded silage with a standard bucket.
“With the other defacers, you deface first and pull the silage down, then come back with a bucket to pick it up,” he said.
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“With the grapples, you can never get a nice sealed face on the pile. It can start heating right away. With the (Emily) defacer, you take only what you need and it goes straight into the bucket, not on the ground.”
Roulin said that even though his piles are on concrete, he never liked the idea of letting silage fall to the ground and then coming back with a bucket to pick it up and feed it to his cows.
“This way, there’s less waste and better use of the hay,” he said.
“And I’ve found we are able to keep the feed fresh for a longer time. You only take from the pile what you need each time and leave a clean face. Then when you come back again that day or the next day, the silage at the face is fresh and good quality.”
Roulin is cautious about saying the Emily defacer has had an effect on milk production, although it’s possible it avoided an early summer slump in milk production.
“It’s so hard to tell about this. We started using it (Emily defacer) in June (2010) just before the heat started. So, did the milk production stay there (stable) because we had this defacer or would it have stayed there anyway?” he said.
“Production went up when I improved the lighting in the barn. Hydro wants me to say, ‘my production went up because of the lights.’ But I can’t say that unless we run some scientific comparisons. Same thing with this defacer. We need to run trials to see the differences.”
