Drying feed barley is an expensive proposition, but high moisture feed must be protected from spoilage.
The alternative is to remove oxygen from the grain, says Bryan Doig, a livestock agrologist with Saskatchewan Agriculture in North Battleford.
“If you’ve got warm, moist grain in the presence of oxygen, that’s favorable for the production of molds,” he said. “And also, so long as you’ve got oxygen and a combustible material, it going to keep heating.”
Like a fire starved of oxygen dies, heating in grain stops if there is no oxygen.
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Producers could remove the moisture, but that’s expensive. Doig estimates drying feed grain with propane-heated air could cost more than 50 cents a bushel.
“And not everybody has a grain drier . . . There are barley piles sitting out all over because guys are tending to the wheat and canola, the high-priced crops, and the barley piles get left.”
One alternative, that costs about half as much, is to seal wet barley in plastic and inject it with anhydrous ammonia, he said. Sealing can be done using a silage clamp. Two parallel rows of round bales, about 20 metres long, are laid out. Leave two or three metres between the row.
Throw a large sheet of six millimetre plastic over the rows and press the plastic to the ground in the alley between them. Also put a bail at the end of the alley to block it.
Auger barley into the alley to about the top of the bales. Fold the ends of the plastic over the grain and make the edges airtight with a bead of sealant.
Doig said a study at the Agriculture Canada research station in Melfort showed that grain with 18-24 percent moisture will keep this way over winter.
But a better idea is to inject anhydrous into the grain at a rate of 1.5 percent on a dry matter basis.
“A thousand bushels of barley at 22 percent moisture would require 400 litres of anhydrous ammonia,” he said. “The advantage with anhydrous is that it guarantees safe storage and will add protein to the grain.”
Anhydrous is nitrogen, he explained, and when the cattle eat it, the microbes in the rumen convert it into a crude protein.
This could add two percentage points to the protein content of the grain. Anhydrous also breaks down the cell wall of the grain, making it more digestible.
Doig suggests that before grain stored this way is fed, it should be cracked or rolled. In fact, it’s even better if the grain is rolled or processed in a hammermill before being packed in the silage clamp.
